Am Greifentor - Blender / Vray

It’s been a long while since I have posted here - so, it’s about time to change that.


All modeling and texturing done in Blender (using the customized build for Vray), rendered in Vray 3.4. Rendertime was around 22 hours at full resolution of 4000x5600.

Materials were mostly made in Substance Designer, others based on image textures from textures.com.

The girl is based on a mesh from MakeHuman and then refined using sculpting within Blender. Her hair is done using multiple particle systems, although I am not really satisfied with the final outcome. All of the cloth in this image is based on simple cloth simulation and then refined using some sculpting. Again, this is a difficult thing for me so it was another learning experience.

Ivy was generated using the Ivy generator script in Blender. I then fine tuned the leaves and materials manually. The walls and bricks are all placed using the awesome Random Object Array script (https://cgcookiemarkets.com/all-products/random-object-array/) and are real geometry - no displacement used anywhere. I tried to mimic the workflow that tools like Railclone for 3dsmax seem to offer - I have never used them, but I think ROA definitely helped me a lot to achieve somewhat efficient workflows for what I had in mind.

Post processing done in Photoshop and the GIMP (film emulation using G’MIC).
The griffon mesh is based on scanned data and available on sketchfab: https://sketchfab.com/models/24cea165ed4347f28d7bd6162952ec2a
Some of the architectural frescos and ornaments come from dikart.ru

You can view a larger version and find more of my “philosophical” thoughts about the image at deviantart
Let me know what you think, I’d be very glad to get some feedback here :slight_smile:

1 Like

Oh wow, what a cool project!
I really like how it has a painterly vibe to it, almost like a painting taken straight from the Renaissance era :slight_smile:

It’s a beautiful image. I love the color mix, the architectural styling, and the multitude of fine details. The more I look, the more new features I see. You must have spent a lot of time on this.

Cool render can you tell more about settings im or bf?

The mood and the lighting is fantastic! The color palette is really perfect for a autumn mood.
I really like how it tells a story.

Two things i have that could be a bit better:
The trees behind the woman should be a bit darker to catch the eye on her.
The second thing is the camera position. Why is the image not straight? I don’t know Vray for Blender, but in Vray for Maya/Max you can use a lens shift to avoid a distortion.

In German:
Vermute da du Österreicher bist ist es auf Deutsch einfacher :wink:
Das Tor “fällt” durch die Rotation der Kamera etwas zu sehr nach Rechts. Versuche die Kamera nur um die Z-Achse zu drehen und das Tor durch den Lens-Shift (sollte Vray für Blender soetwas haben) ins Bild zu bekommen.
Ist eine der Grundlagen der Architektur-Fotografie.

Bin echt faszieniert von deinem Bild. Die Qualität ist wirklich herausragend!

Thank you very much for the replies, I did go for a painterly look - glad it somewhat got through.

@marcoso:
I used Brute Force + Light Cache. Rendersettings are not really optimized and I could have used less samples without sacrificing any visible quality so the render time is quite a bit longer than it could have been.

@biteworks: Thanks! I’ll answer in english though, so everyone can read it:

  1. In fact I already did darken the trees behind the figure, precisely for that reason, but I didn’t want to go overboard to avoid have a “black hole” there. BUt I agree, she doesn’t stand out as much as I’d have liked…
  2. Ah, yeah. I personally didn’t mind the rotation but I can see your point. I’ll keep it in mind!
    Aber nochmal danke, bedeutet mir sehr viel :slight_smile:

BUt I agree, she doesn’t stand out as much as I’d have liked…

I would try to add a slight rimlight from behind here (a spot should do it).

And I agree about the rotated camera, the lines should be vertical.

Beautiful work, the light has a very strong Hudson River school vibe going – the BG trees reinforce that a lot also. I do think the figure, though well done, is not nearly as accomplished as everything else and so tends to look somewhat out of place, but I suspect you feel somewhat like that also.