congcong009's 2009 BWC entry: Floating with Making of

[congcong009]

Hi all,
Here's my BWC entry for this year's game. Now I will call it done.



Description:
A lost fantasy world, as her legend floating way nobody know where she will be.

The following tech and tips are used in this work.
SSS shade and displacement map modify in lady body.
Sculpt on low ploy to bake the Bump and AO map.
Fall-off node for fish and body shade.
Texture in light to create caustics effect in water.
Alpha texture mapping to create the underwater light.
Camera mapping and Project mapping to create the rocks and hill.
Blender Internal render for each layer and composite in photoshop for color balance.
Node pipeline set on glow effect.
Matte painting on two bird and night feeling.
Total works time: from 1st Oct to today, I work every weekend on this.
Render time: 2hours for all layers to output.
Render Size: 4977x3794 300bit. JPG quality 12
please check the wip thread from the following thread:WIP Thread
High res check here:High Res
I will commit it later. Hope you like my works.
Thanks,
congcong009

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The Making of

In the old legend the land floated in the ocean on the back of a huge turtle. And the land is used called as motherland and I prefer naked girl than turtle, so I change the turtle to a hot spirit. And I like lake better than ocean, so I create this concept.


The body is easy to model and I create her "hand" as branch. The small branch could be created by curves and I convert the mesh to poly so it could be easy to make UV.




Then I add some small details like ship and fish, although they may not easy to see clearly but I prefer to make it all good looking.


Then I sculpt the body, ocean and land in zbrush. Then import the low poly back to blender. And do some small tweak in details. The castles are created fast by alt+d so I can handle them easily, one UV finish will affect all objects.



I use fall off node to create the ocean and add simple texture into the color channel.


I backed all texture in xNormal with 4k size. The color and spec will be easy to paint in photoshop. The AO and bump, nor texture could be baked in xNormal. Take good care to set the sss shade, that would make your work looks incridbale. The lights are typical 3-lights setting, I use area lamp as reflect light. The casutic light is easy too, you just need to add a texture to a area lamp texture channel. The rock texture is mapped into stick channel, you can take a look at Durian's big director Colin's Camera Mapping tutor. That helps a lot.




After all render done, I import them into Photoshop for final composite work. The DOF is created by z-alpha channel, which is easy to control IMO. The color balance is also easy in Photoshop, and do some matte painting. This is most of my steps and I hope these could help for your work as reference. Sorry for my English, please feel free to let me know any doubts from you. I would be happy to share all my tips.
Thanks,
congcong009

[Jeepster]

congratulations on finishing
it looks really really nice, i think you really have a good chance at winning
oh and 5 stars for sure!

[Excalaberr]

Looks good! I'm a bit late, but I have a few critics:

The boats and fish are in the same position in both times, I thought this took away from the dynamics.

And I would personally put a tad more fish.

But WOW this is a good image 5*s!

[tyrant monkey]

good work and good luck for the competition

[congcong009]

Thank you guys~ really happy you love it. Anyway I have committed it already, so I think that's it.
Good luck for everybody on BWC

[rozmiarek]

Looks great! 5* from me!

[DhAoS]

Simply amazing!!

[roelant2]

yesterday i saw your wip and i showed it to al my friends to let them see what things you can build with blender when your really good, they could not believe this was made with blender

this is just an amazing image and i hope i wil be as good as you some day

i bet this is going to make the gallery

[loramel]

Congratulations on finishing your entry. It turned out very nice and should earn you a top score in the bwc.
All the best in the competition.

[pildanovak]

Heh I just thought, oh man, another noob posting some painting he downloaded on the internet.
But then I looked in you wip thread
congrats

[TheANIMAL]

Ahh, the night time one is better in my personal opinion.

Both are great though, i seem to have made a mess of myself on your WIP thread though

[spacetug]

great job!

my guess is that it would go straight to gallery under most conditions
i like the day version better

[maul2]

AMazing amazing work. Although having the image basically repeated in the final render kills it for me. And I can understand wanting to show it off, but it kills the feel of the image. It would be much more effective to just pick one of them (I would say the night one). Unless there is some artistic reason for having it duplicated that I am just completely not getting. But having it twice really kills the composition.

But just looking at each image on it's own, it looks AMAZING!

[congcong009]

thanks man~ May the force be with you :P

[kram1032]

So, you uploaded both versions as it's presented here?
Great

[shortlord]

I agree 100% with maul2, the duplication of the image really destroys a lot of atmosphere. Both versions are beautiful on their own, 5*, gallery stuff! But together it just looks as if you wanted to show off some lighting setups, the composition gets killed completely.

[Alvaro]

Congratulations, a beautiful and inspiring work.

[Mpu.Bater]

oohh man...
I can't criticize your work much, but i think the day shoot give more "epicness".

you really make us proud. very inspiring!

[congcong009]

thank you guys~ I just can not give up any one of them~ I just enjoy blending and show them all~ lol

[foCus]

Hi there, nice image!
Looks way cool. I like the dayrender better than the nightrender, it just feels more worked on, but either way it's very nice!
Good luck in the BWC!