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Really nice job and definitely took the concepts to a completely different place
I really like her posing and expression. The only feedback Id give is it would be awesome to see what is coming out of the "portal" a bit more. Its sort of dim (though that may be as intended) but really great job! 
I agree, as the horns on the demon are not visable. I have a mesh light off camera left that throws some of the blue light to the pedestal, but it did not bring out any of the demon details. I think the portal could use more work, while it is an emissive plane and I had the emission color the red shade, I forgot to color plane itself. I may try something else there too and see how it turns out.
Sometimes when a plane is turned into an emissive the light is only coming off 1 side. It could be you have the light emitting side on the bottom.
Okay *bites nails* this is my first time posting here, but something about @Leana's image pulled me in.
I really like how the same colours are used on the figure, via clothing hair and makeup. And then these colours are reflected in the butterflies and background. I would say that I'd prefer the image to be a little grounded--even just a light shadow under the figure, but that's my personal choice. The whole image still works very well without it.
I only started the addiction that is Daz just before Christmas, so I have no clue about creating an image in 3DL. I let the idea of Leana's image stew in the back of my brain, before I started to play around yesterday. I looked back at the image as I was nearing the time to render and realised I wanted more cohesive colours and that the eyes--so distinctive in Leana's image--needed that in mine too. Medusa's eyes are her main weapon after all ;-) Also I realised after that, instead of being surrounded by butterflies, I'd surrounded my figure with snakes!
I don't like snakes.
But I really like your render! Very interesting direction you took the concept. Bravo!
And welcome to the challenges. I hope we see a lot more of you and your work here.
guess I'll have a stab (pun intended) at L'Adair's sword fight.
1) melee fights are short and ugly. even the sport of fencing only lasts seconds before a touch occurs which represents either a kill or a debilitating hit
so the idea of Hollywoodese sword fights always look like someone handed ballet dancers swords.
figured since we are supposed to add the previous months stuff into our submissions I worked on the expressions the environment lighting and poses.
I call it : Escaping Bandits.
Thanks, @L'Adair :)
I hope to join in more. Mostly just I flail about on my own ;-)
Really nice image! I really like the color scheme and her expression :)
I just have two minor remarks:
Thanks, Leana! :)
I seem to be in a 'chopping bits off phase', tbh. I have a gargoyle baking right now who's not fully in the frame, lol
I'm with you on the background, and in two minds about it. It was okay in the viewport, but as it rendered it became a little too dark and strong. Though I'm happy for the snakes to fade back a bit, as well.
Morning All!
Kaye Kaye - That is a fantastic render! If you've only been doing this since Christmas then you're doing a fabulous job learning Studio!! I love the strong translucency you have on the skin it gives her an otherworldly feel which is perfect for Medusa! The only thing I would do is to lighten the red on the snake eyes (or put a red emissive on them so they glow) so you really get the feel that they are watching you lol TBH I think the cutting off of snake heads doesn't bother me as the main focus of the image is Medusa herself
Dragoneyes002 - I love the attention to detail you have in the scene from the body in the background to the shadow on the back wall on the left! There are only a couple of things I would adjust with the scene, change the water color as it has a "grimy" feel to it while the rest of the scene is much cleaner, lower/soften the skin specular on the girl a little bit so it matches the rest of the figures and then add a touch more blood to the scene since the pirate did just get his arm chopped off (but of course then that might get into the grey area of gore/non-family friendly). Overall your render is really well composed and made me laugh when I saw the look on the Pirate's face!! Great Job!
Great image! I really like the expressions, and the shadow of the other bandit in the background.
One thing I noticed is that the planks in the foreground are neat blocks, they should probably have a bit more relief/texture
My image is inspired by @Kismet2012 's image of the surfer at the bus stop.
The story behind this image is that Robert has just moved into his new loft apartment. He is feeling lonely and depressed because his relationship with his partner has just ended - this is why he had to move.
I am wondering whether the lighting is right - there are very few shadows although shadows are switched on. Also do I need more cases or some boxes adding to the image?
@Sueya
Did you by chance render the male figure separately from the rest of the environment? He is not casting any shadows is why I'm asking. If that is the case if I might suggest rendering out the room with the cases as a background image then rendering him on the sofa with ground shadows turned on in the Iray Render settings under environment, this will let you blend together just make sure you use the same light setup as the background image. For your question on the additional crates/boxes I would say yes but also rotate the angle of the render so the back wall and sofa are on an angle to give the scene some more visual interest! As it is now that's a really looooong wall to fill up with stuff unless you are going to use instances lol
It is all one image. The image is rendered in 3Delight if that makes any difference. The distant light is coming through the window. There is also an ambient light to the right of the sofa. I also added a spotlight going up from the uplighter but you can only see the stand for this. Perhaps I need to move the camera away from the sofa so you see the whole lamp.
My first step is just put only the character into a scene and checking if the poses, cloth clipping, everything come together.
Then, find some environment to take the shoot, this part are still quite difficult as I just have to pray the HDRI can make it looks reasonably good.
Just putting this out for some review on poses, composition (currently uncropped):
a) need some fire glowy effect from the left. Trying to get a glow on the edge of the katana will be tough without other parts being overly bright (without some serious mask painting work in PS)
b) need some white rim on the right to get other parts into focus, fox ears, hair,
20% complete as of now.
One thing that I'm really interested, how long does it take for more experienced user to perform all the steps, to create the samples for this contest?
Took almost 6hours for all processes (excluding render time). Most probably way too long. Need to hear from more experienced user, if this can be done in 2h or something. Anyway, here's my ninja fox girl.
https://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/838726/
Don't be so hard on yourself; 6 hours to set up this scene is good, imo. Some scenes fall into place easily, and take only a few hours. Other scenes will take a few hours just to get one detail right, (especially if dforce is involved!) I have one image I worked on for about six weeks, off and on, (here, if you're curious.)
Your take on Linwelly's image is very nice. The wide format works well and the glow of the fire on the edges of the fox tail is really nice touch.
However, as you have the full character in the scene, I'd move her up in the camera's view so that her skirt isn't cut off, or come closer to her, (either moving the camera closer or using the camera settings controls to zoom in closer,) and cut off about a third of her from the bottom. Also the tree/branches you used look much less realistic than the other elements of the scene. I like that they add to the visual texture without overpowering the image, but they still draw my eye because they look, to me, cartoonish and out of place.
Aside from those two nit-picking details, this is a lovely image. And something tells me that girl enjoys her job, maybe a little too much. If she came at me like that, with that smile, I'd know she was going to be the last thing I ever saw!
Ok yea the shadows under the sofa and crates looked like Iray render shadows lol I haven't rendered in 3Delight in years so will be no help to you on the lighting
@Ruris
Great scene I really like the movement you have in there!
I agree with L'Adair on the branches at the side of the scene. I also noticed a couple of things, the mask is poking into one of her Kitsune ears and the bottom edges of the skirt have some hard edges on them (smoothing should take care of this for you!).
Hi everybody, I want to provide some additional info on my render as I didn't manage to add that in time before the NEC went life.
So the character I Eilish https://www.daz3d.com/eilish-for-genesis-3-female with the "elven" form which has the blue skin colour, I changed that a bit to have a darker shade in the skin but left the skin otherwize untouched, the facepaint comes with the character though I didn't use the original faste texture with the markings but a new opacity map from the facepaint and added that into the emissive channel plus changed the colour for that purble. In a similar way I made the eyes glow a bit.
the hair is FireGem Hair https://www.daz3d.com/fireGem-hair-for-genesis-3-female-s-and-genesis-2-female-s which gave me fits for moving (some of you noticed ;)) With the moves that come with it one can move the parts that are in front to the back, averything else that moved is below chest level which is rather useless. With more time on my hands I would have tried to use the bones of neck and shoulder to give it more movement (or change to a different hair altogether).
the "armor" is from Eagle-Guard Armor (https://www.daz3d.com/eagle-guard-armor-for-genesis-3-female-s-and-genesis-3-male-s), the lower part being this one Eagle-Guard Torso Armor and Kilt https://www.daz3d.com/eagle-guard-armor-for-genesis-3-female-s-and-genesis-3-male-s
this actually does have a nice cover for the whole body, this is one of the rare occasions where I went for the "magic bikini - roleplay" version as with the drow/darkelf I'm already in the high fantasy genre.
the background is the age old but still nice https://www.daz3d.com/3-gate-pass brushed up with a fire from https://www.daz3d.com/iray-fireworx
I used two emissive planes for lighting both in the cold light range one coming from the right back of the image and the other one from front left below
nice observation on the hair movement. The pose is suppoed to be the firm stand right before the next move while there has been movement before. I was originally plannung to give the full figure but then chose the close up to show more of her face. The impression of threat was the one I wanted to transport the most.
I said some words on the hair above but yes there are quite some chages needed on that hair and it would be something that needs postwork, I didn't want to put a postworked image here to meke it easier for you to see how it looks without any sort of postwork.
look below at the quoate of ruris comment on the topic
As I said the dark skin was from the Eilish character and I don't think it was meant to be a paint layer. It might be that my tinkering with the colour made it look more painted than the original. But it seems it would need some work to make it look like skin :D
the eyes were meant as the draw in point of the image the lashes ebing so overly white might be a result from the light coming from front below, I might be possible to tunr their opacitiy a bit down so they don't overreact with the light and give the flat look.
Ok a work on the focal point here. Yes it was a decision I made to take the focus on the eyes and leave the f/stop at 22 so that the tip of the sword reaches out of the focus.
I think that keeping the edge sharp in focus would be an interesting option as well (as I'm making comics and keep thinking in sequential images this would actually be a really nice follow up image) so yes there is never only one solution for an image, and that's why I'm looking forward to what you come up with :D
when I started I needed about two weeks (using all the evenings) to make a full scene with everything finished :D
How long you take is depending on so many factors, at the moment I'm creating a new character for my personal pen and paper group and I've been fiddling on and off with her for close to 6 hours now, until I had every detail the way I wanted. ( now she needs a horse...)
So I like your Kitsune take on the image, very dynamik pose, interesting choice of colours, nice light! But it feels to me that she doesn't really belong into that environment, she has no connection from the colour and is not touching it at any point so she feels distached to me. One other thing that is a bit of nitpicking is her direction of view. it is not into the camera but it's not really enough off camera to follow the motion direction off the image. My suggestion would be to twist her a tad more around her y axis so she really looks out of the image.
It can wildly vary from image to image and artist to artist. I know I've had some images I've done take me days (to this day) and others that can take me a couple hours. It also depends on whether I go for a more straight render out of DS with very little postwork or whether I decided to fiddle forever in Photoshop (if I decide to fiddle then you can definitely add on extra hours to the process LOL)
For straight renders, I've had where it took me 10+ hours to get everything set up just the way I wanted and the lighting etc. I've had other times where something just pulled together and only took about an hour. If you add in dynamic cloth etc then you can definitely add more time to the process since getting everything flowing the way you picture can take some time and a lot of simulating. I try to just enjoy the process and try to let the image take the time it wants/needs to take
6 hr set up is not taking that long for the result you achieved. some renders can run 20+ hrs others less than 1hr. The set up can take days if not longer on some which is why so many use premade environments as is without altering the textures or using drop in backgrounds just to have more time to work on the character/s which doesn't even account for props clothing hair lighting...etc.
I like to create one off props as well as rigged props on another program IE: a fully rigged Tachikoma which can take quite a while on their own without ever touching Daz yet.
L'adair, Elliandra, Linwelly: Thanks for your comments and compliments. I removed the border from earlier version. Fixed the ears issue.
Toned down the yellow hue a bit, looks more pleasing to me but could use more eyes. The warping tools to adjust skirt still need some practice, will try to implement on future piece.
On the eye contact, I have tried the Look at Camera tools too. Its super nice, but when I look at cosplay photos, often models are not looking directly at the lens, thought to introduce some imperfection.
I could use a good zen garden, bamboo grove setup, any ideas?
And appreciate you all for sharing the efforts you take to create art too. Sometimes I wonder if being reasonably good is too far.
https://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/839001/
@Elliandra - I've lightened the snake eyes with Ps. I think it is working better, especually with the improved definition of the snakes.
Thanks for the suggestions! :)
Oh, and is it okay to have a stab at another image and post it? Something I bought yesterday made me think of @Linwelly's image.
Of course, you can post as many as you want.
I like the new version:)
Both changes make the snakes stand out more.
Elli, I am overwhelmed at your kind words! Thank you for your suggestions as well. I will figure out what you are talking about, lol....I come from the Photoshop world, so I know what a bump map is, at least. I need to watch some of the videos. I kind of just jumped in, feet first. DAZ is is a huge change for me, but oh, so much fun!
There are a fair few videos here that can help get you started: https://www.youtube.com/user/WWWDAZ3DCOM/featured
Also be sure to take a peak at some of the other challenges as we generally include links and information in them that can help with specific topics