Secret Rendevous (CLOSED) (CLOSED)

On a bright winter's day,
with new snow and blue sky,
there was love in the air
for Mary and her Lorelai

Away from their families,
and away from each eye,
away to the labyrinth
went Mary with her Lorelai.

Going deep in the maze,
their whole world they defy
as Lorelai kissed Mary,
and Mary kissed her Lorelai.



I don't typically show my work with my entries (other than the wire frame images), but I thought I might with this one.

I started with a base maze which I retextured to a more appealing brickwork with a sunny environment and a bit of cloud cover:



Next I added some grass clumps and vines for the walls:



Next I hid all the leaves from the vines (it being winter, and all):



After the leaves are gone, I add a snowy ground and morph it so that it's lower in the center than along the walls. I also add snow to the top of the walls:



Then, to add a little more realism, I add a few clumps of snow along the bottom of the walls for snow that has fallen off the edge of the top of the walls:



Next I created a geoshell and gave it a semi-transparent snowy material, trying to adjust the tiling so that it would be a little more snowy on the right side (in the shade) and a little less snowy on the left (in the sun). In order to keep the brick look of the wall, I had to adjust the geoshell's normal and displacement maps to match those of the walls it's covering:



Then I have to do the same for the vines and grass clumps (more opacity on the right, in the shade and less opacity on the left, in the sun):



Then, to add just a little more depth, I add some snowy trees in the background and recolor them with a little bit of green so they aren't completely white:



Then I add in my characters, Mary and Lorelai, dress them in medieval-ish outfits, and pose them. (I found that it takes quite a bit of tinkering to get mouths to line up just right):



Finally, because it's a winter scene, they need to be properly dressed for the weather, so I add two different pieces of outerwear (one for each character) and make sure they both have a fur component to them:



Then I render the image through a volume cube  (thick enough to give me some atmosphere, but no so far out from the camera that it affects the scene). That's (basically) how I got to my finished product. Not sure why I decided that I'd put all the process out for this one. I just thought it would be nice, so I did. 

Here's a few wireframe images to satisfy the contest requirements:







And a square image for the temporary thumbnail:



If you're reading this sentence, bless you for staying with it all the way to the end.

A romantic work of a scene=)
Maybe the title should have been Render-Vois with a twist or rendezvous to be correct.
Happy new year and good luck.

Yes, that would not have been an ideal predicament to find yourself in, in the years gone by. Lovely render. Well done.

Thumbnail for contest gallery