Soooooo, welcome to my entry for the Horrific Render Contest.For this project, I wanted to do something a little different with the horror genre. You don't often see horror movies where it's one monster going after another. It's usually someone being chased through a dark corridor, something jumping out of a cupboard, or a creature terrorising an unsuspecting human, i dont often watch horror, but i went down the rabit hole this past month, i found Annihilation, and i think sci-fi horror might be my new thing, the bear in that movie gave me shivers, but again another movie where its horror vs unsuspecting human.

so I thought, what if we flipped the genre around a little?

So, I came up with this medieval-looking dungeon, a rather questionable-looking creature standing in the middle of it, and two rather terrifying deer-like things making their grand entrance in the foreground.
So, where did I start?

As with pretty much all my scenes, I started with the environment first, then moved on to lighting.

I have this thing where I refuse to light objects directly. I much prefer building the lighting into the environment itself. So, instead of throwing lights at everything, I like using practical light sources that actually belong in the scene. Lanterns, oil lamps, fire and so on.

For this particular environment, I wanted something that felt medieval, a little dungeon-like, and most importantly, moonlit.

I started building up the environment and establishing where I wanted the light to come from before introducing the rest of the assets. I also paid quite a bit of attention to the foreground, making sure that objects closer to the camera had enough geometry and detail to catch the light properly.

And well, that turned out great, I would say!

The characters and all the little extras

The main character's clothing and draping were made using a combination of Blender and Marvelous Designer. I wanted the character to have a fairly imposing silhouette, with all those layered fabrics, the oversized hood and, of course, the antlers, from blenders sketchfab library which I re textured and stretched

Some of the fire and volumetric effects were actually leftovers from an older project where I was teaching myself fire and fluid simulations.

I figured I might as well put those experiments to good use.

Soooooo, naturally, I started adding more simulations, more volumes, more subdivisions and more detail than was probably necessary.

Blender was NOT impressed.

If there's one thing Blender hates, it's an artist who refuses to simplify their scene.

The amount of geometry and volumetric elements started taking quite a toll on performance, especially when I wanted to introduce additional effects like motion blur. But I was pretty adamant about keeping the detail, particularly in areas closer to the camera, I should get a medal for the amount of times I had to use the decimate modifier , it all worked out in the end, most of the textures are from a collection of scans i collect on my phone using polycam, so i always have a mix of textures and objects i can throw into my projects, the wooden elements, i had to find on sketch fab, and uv unwrap so i could texture them myself to suite the scene

A little bit about the lighting and camera

The lighting was probably one of my favourite parts of this project.

I wanted that contrast between the cooler moonlight and the warmer orange tones coming from the fire. The purple and blue tones help give the dungeon that eerie atmosphere, while the warmer light adds a little more depth and helps bring out the details in the environment.

I also wanted the two deer creatures in the foreground to do a little more than just stand there looking terrifying.

They're actually quite important to the composition. They frame the central character and almost give the impression that something has just arrived in the room.

I played around with quite a few camera effects to make everything feel a little less like a clean 3D render and more like something you'd see in an actual horror film.

Chromatic aberration, lens distortion, dispersion, glare and reflections were all added to help sell that idea, that the monsters come into frame screeching and screeming and shake the camera,s perspective and details, they essentially make a grand entrance.

The dispersion around the creatures was intentional. I wanted it to feel almost as though they're screaming directly at the camera, shaking the lens and distorting the image.

Basically, I wanted the viewer to feel like they're a little too close to whatever is happening in this dungeon.

Rendering this thing

The entire scene was rendered using Blender's Eevee engine.

I initially wanted to push the scene further with motion blur and a few additional effects, but between the geometry, subdivisions and all those lovely volumetric simulations, things were getting a little out of hand.

The final render took approximately SIX HOURS.

Yes. Six. ill put it in the comments.

And that's with Eevee!

I exported the final image as an OpenEXR file using Blender's Log colour pipeline, then worked with ACES colour management to get the look I wanted,i knew that i wanted something punch because the scene felt flat, but had really cool painterly look, i kinda reminded me of the Arcane series when i was working my way through the project.

From there, I built up the lighting and finishing effects individually inside Blender's compositor. I wanted to have as much control as possible over the highlights, glare, reflections and overall atmosphere rather than relying on one big post-processing adjustment, split toning is a must have node in the compositor to really sperate the scene, adding in noise and playing around with the sensor noise node can really bring life to a render

Would have been lovely to have a little more GPU horsepower behind all of this, especially an RTX card, but alas, we work with what we have ,anyway, that's pretty much it!

This project was honestly a combination of having a lot of fun and occasionally wondering why I decided to make things so complicated for myself.

It definitely pushed me outside my comfort zone, particularly with the amount of detail, lighting and simulations I wanted to incorporate.

But I think that's one of the best things about creating artwork like this. You experiment, you break things, you learn something new, and sometimes you end up with something you're actually quite proud of.

My biggest takeaway, as always, is to have fun with it. I tend to let the lighting guide my scenes first, and then everything else slowly starts falling into place.

And well. I think this little moonlit dungeon turned out really great, i wanted it to mainily feel like something you would find in the basment of an old abandonded chapel

Made with Blender and and the clothes from Marvelous Designer, thrown onto the armature with a tearing opacity map texture from blender kit, and to get the sheen and withered effect I used the color ramp node where i could

Thanks for having a look, and happy Halloween and I can’t wait to seee everyone else’s entries ✨all the best to everyone