I sculpted this skeleton cat back in 2020 for the Sculpt January challenge and I was really happy with it at the time, but the old render I did was too boring, just some basic three light setup with a black background.
This time I went with something more atmospheric using volumetric fog and a strong red vs dark green lighting.
The scene setup is very simple, there’s a strong red light on the side and a soft cyan/green fill light at the front. The other two area lights on the floor are used to fill the volumetric fog.
The volume shading uses two noise textures mixed together, one with high and the other with low frequency detail.
To separate the cat more from the background I used the camera position to decrease the volume density the closer it is to the camera. However this made the nice green volume light at the ground disappear, so I blended a gradient coming from the ground up to bring it back.
Finally the cat shading just uses an ambient occlusion node mixed with a noise texture to give the crevices a darker dirt color
For this project I downloaded Blender 3.5 alpha to use the new viewport compositor, it’s much more convenient to do color grading when you can see the result immediately without needing to render the image.
I also used the new AgX view transform instead of filmic this time. I will not pretend like I know how these transforms works, I just really like how the colors look with AgX.
This was rendered in Eevee.
Great lighting, love the color contrast.
