Into the City

As twilight deepens into night, Daenestra waits by the curb, Nimbus perched beside her. The taxi meter ticks softly while they watch two young women disappear into the city, unaware—or unbothered—by whatever might be waiting in the shadows. All of the characters used are based on purchased characters with additional morphs. On the left is MDD Brianne for G8F from here, in the center is AB Diah for Genesis 8 and 8.1 Female from RenderHub, and on the right is Daenestra for Angharad 8 from DAZ3D. The outfits for the figures in the foreground are Fancy Punk and Steampunk Shenanigans for Genesis 8 from Renderosity, and Elita Cyberpunk Megapack for Genesis 8 Female from DAZ3D is on Daenestra. The environment is XI Steampunk City from DAZ3D, and the rabbit is from All the Rabbits by AM at DAZ3D. I began creating the scene by setting up each character with their hair, clothing, and props in their own project. I saved each one as a scene subset for use in the final composition. I found a sunset HDRI at HDRI Haven to use for general/ambient lighting for XI Steampunk City. After merging the figures into the scene it became obvious that I would need to remove a few things in the environment and use Scene Optimizer to get everything to fit on my 16Gb of GPU memory. I created 2 plane primitives to block the light from the HDRI to simulate the unseen buildings still being there. After I got the figure poses and expressions set up the way I wanted, I added numerous spotlights to give the scene the key lights and additional lighting I wanted. As a final step I added the rabbit and set up the fog. The final render took about 3.5 hours (3600X3600 - so I can post it in my galleries), after numerous times starting the render, seeing something that needed to be fix, adjusted, stopping the render, fixing the issue, starting again (and again, and again.....). The image was set up using DS Pro Beta 4.24 and rendered with Iray. Minor post work was done with Gimp (levels and vignette). The original render was 3600 x 3600, Gimp was used to reduce the image size for contest entry.

Hours Spent: 28
Software Used: DAZ Studio 4 With IRAY, Gimp