Night Time Bath 3D Render, Digital Artwork by Sisu123

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Night Time Bath

3D Render by Sisu123

One of my favorite things to do is to take a bath at night.

Special thanks to Midgaard229 for all the feedback! You can see their influence in the preview renders.

Background Information and Technical Details:

Headshots vs Full Body Portraits: I used to be a headshot photographer, which is a very different meta from full body portraits. The importance of lighting-complexity and the environment are negatively correlated between the two portrait styles. That is, the environment typically becomes less important the closer one is to a headshot and the importance of complex lighting increases, and vice versa.

Headshot Lighting: It's common to have lighting recipes in headshot photography, you may have noticed that some of my renders have unfortunately had similar lighting styles. Typically, a headshot portrait involves a key, fill, rims, back, hair, and eye lights for a more glamor look. It's also possible to create dramatic headshots using a key alone or with a fill in addition; however, almost no one wants that sort of style as their portrait. Lighting recipes are used to draw out, emphasize, or hide certain facial features of the model. Our brains love seeing faces and can recognize unique differences between individuals, which is why headshot portraits even exist in the first place. This mentality, of lighting recipes, has had negative influences on my renders outside of headshots, precisely because of environmental importance.

Full Body Portraits: Full body portraits are more feasible and fun in 3D software compared to real life, where spaces are cramped and strobes are a burden. It is easier to tell a story or communicate a mood through a full portrait due to the environment. The key difference between photography portraits and 3D renders is the area of focus. Photographers often love an other-worldly lighting aesthetic in full portraits with perfect models, but 3D artists love natural lighting and imperfections. You can see the impact of photography in my previous work especially! As Midgaard229 pointed out, natural lighting tends to have one primary source (the environment) and perhaps some fill from natural reflections (a pond) or artificial sources (light bulbs). When multiple strong lights (key + rim + hair) hit the character it creates an aesthetically pleasing, but unrealistic look in most cases.

This Render: As you can see in the progress renders, I started off with strong day time environmental lighting serving as rim lighting. With the fill from the surrounding light bulbs I had a relatively flat high key render. With some tweaking in post I would have made another conventional render from me. In contrast, what makes Midgaard's work stand out is how they use lighting to make the character "pop out", which I've been trying to learn without copying, as you can see in my previous work "Voidwalkers". They pointed out that the character didn't pop or stand out. So I added in a night time HDRI with some trees providing textured lighting. I added some candles to serve as fill and to separate her from the background, in terms of color. They then pointed out the aggressive dutch angle I had and suggested using the rule of thirds as well. He also mused about the possibility of a far away vertical render, which I decided to give a try. Let me know which one you prefer!