When this render came into mind, I’d been doing various doodles for a few days but none of them was really grabbing my attention. I knew I wanted to get back to the more fantasy-oriented themes and start building more tagging packs, but the question was, with what?
So instead of starting yet another doodle, it was off to Picasa to see what other doodles I’ve started but never quite clicked in the past, and this one sprang out at me. It was originally for the Red Witch series, but it never really looked quite right – her established armor/clothing and tattoos never fit the concept I had in mind for the image.
I recently added new skin textures to my collection though, and one in particular seemed to go perfectly with it. The combination of such thick tattoos plus sparkling body jewels brought the image more into life.
I changed the original’s contents of the goblet from liquid to a sparkling powder-like substance, generating the initial flow in-camera. As much as I tried to change the camera angles, I wasn’t able to completely cover all the genitalia, and so had to break the idea a little by adding a thong, but the upper body coverage worked perfectly. A different hairstyle rounded off the image.
This took a lot more passes than I usually make for a render to take into Photoshop for postwork. In addition to the color, ambient occlusion, shadow, and displacement passes of the past, I needed to break the image down into several alpha mats. These were needed for the additional effects I knew would be needed to add kick to the result.
The hair was made less “artificial looking”, and the sparkles in the air separate from the golden ones falling from the goblet were added using brushes. Some tidying up was needed for the overlaps between various layers as well.
The title and signature feather were added inside Photoshop as well, then the whole thing was saved and taken into Picasa for the watermark. All told, this image took the whole day to produce, but the results seem worth it!
That Hit The Spot
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