CONTESTS/HORRIFIC RENDER CONTEST 4/GALLERY

Sylvia the Zombie Slayer 3D Render, Digital Artwork by Sisu123

! BLOCK USER

! REPORT

PROFILE

Sylvia the Zombie Slayer

3D Render by Sisu123

This was a fairly complex render, hope you all like it!

The Process (For Transparency):
1. I started in Daz3D. I posed Sylvia and her props and selected the clothing and hair. I also loaded in the environment "Trashed Wonderland". I added in some of the props, namely the trash cans, bin, bags, and tires. You can see my initial idea in the beginning render. I lit Sylvia with a 5-point light setup afterwards with a warm temperature, which you can see in the overlay image made in Affinity Photo. I added in blood and bullet fx in Daz, since I don't know how to do that in Blender or in post.

2. I find it much easier and intuitive to do lighting in Blender, due to light linking, so I like to render environmental projects in Blender. The problem is that Daz character skin looks awful in Blender and hairs that lack hair cards do not show up. You can see what I mean in the initial Blender environmental lighting setup.

3. I then began adding soldiers and zombies to the scene. I realized that the monsters in the background are not obvious zombies at first glance, so I added a close up at the bottom. Having this many characters in the scene overloaded my VRAM, so I had to render the soldiers separately from Sylvia and the zombies. Because the lighting is really complex (I had lighting setup groups for each character), I couldn't afford to render the soldiers with a transparent background. That meant I had to manually paint in the soldiers in Affinity.

4. In Affinity, I realized that Sylvia's lighting is horrific for the scene, since I changed color palettes from sepia to green. I rendered her again, but this time with greenish lighting. I also added an invisible light emitter ball to highlight the pistol and Sylvia's upper torso. The lighting wasn't perfect as it couldn't match the Blender render tones, so I needed to fix that in post. I also added in smoke and spark fx in post using "Ron's Light Radiance" and "Ron's Sparks and Embers", respectively. The smoke assets were a god-send in helping blend Sylvia into the scene, it wasn't realistic looking until then.

PROFILE

LovecraftianPenguinMon, Sep 22

Karma: 7,679

Great render! Thanks for the detailed info on the rendering and compositing process, If i ever start doing renders again i may have to add blender into my workflow.

Good luck with the contest entry.

! REPORT

PROFILE

Sisu123

Karma: 1,401

Mon, Sep 22

Thank you! smile

Yeah, I'm going to try and simplify the process in the future. Hair is definitely the biggest hurdle. Blender is awesome! Using Diffeomorphic to import Daz characters makes the process simple. Armoured Avian has some very helpful videos on YouTube about how to use it.