Behold! A fearsome and mysterious dominatrix who wields her book of lust. In its pages the demons and desires of any man are laid bare before her eyes, so that she might glean from them a means of breaking even the strongest will.
CG Boost has yet again inspired me to tackle and complete an absurdly ambitious project well outside my comfort zone on an extremely tight timeline! I am NOT a character artist, so this was my first ever scene featuring a fully exposed human face of my own making. The project took 6 days start to finish, 4 of which were dedicated to sculpting the girl. I have very little experience with human characters and no previous successes to look back on, but after a dozen or so hours of sculpting with lots of both real and stylized reference I was pretty happy with the result. I then had to create the book, the outfit, and the reference of both real people and various stylized characters. The final scene is just an abstract background enveloping the character, but it still involved many hours of work refining the lighting and defining the flow of the color palette. I used a dozen or so light sources of various colors, volumetric atmosphere, and various material tricks to refine the image. I used gradients to highlight regions of certain meshes so that I could customize the colors to fit nicely with the distribution of colors. One example of this is the hair in the bottom right, which I changed from the normal warm, dark hue to a vibrant purple and pink combo to match the background! I used a similar trick on her clothing to transition from a pinkish purple near the bottom to a red tone around her shoulders. Even her skin uses a gradient to shift between two variations on the shader! I had one version that worked well for her face and another darker shader that looked good on her exposed abs, so I blended between them with a gradient.
The background is actually rendered in the scene and is created using geometry. I used spheres with heavy displacement voronoi displacement and a simple deform modifier to twist them into that lovely swirl. I then highlighted the edges based on a fresnel node and made the rest transparent. The technique obviously produces some very pretty results, but it has drawbacks like leaving some visible staggering on some of the edges because of limitations on the geometry. Next time I use this effect so close up I will have to come up with a way to eliminate those pesky little artefacts!
My ideas for the final image changed a lot in the weeks before I finally sunk my teeth into the project, and it wasn’t until about two days before the deadline that I envisioned the pose and composition I was both artistically happy with and reasonably confident in my technical ability to create. Once I knew what I was going for I worked past 5am two nights in a row in a frantic rush to create the book, costume, background, hair, and lighting from scratch, and then to touch up the final render in Krita. I’ve never been so consistently driven to complete an art project, or any project for that matter, in my life!!!