Bringing it all together was the fun bit. Most of the hard work done, the challenge here was getting the volumetric lighting right. Balancing out the objects so the eye flows around the composition, setting the camera optics and placing the lights. Luckily for me I’m a studio photographer too so when I realised you can mimic a real world setup within Keyshot it became a lot more intuitive. From the main spotlight through to fill and rim lights I was able to quickly set the lights and intensity how I wanted them.
It didn’t stop there though. Taking the final rendering into photoshop meant I was able to clean up the artwork and tweak it in such a way so that I was happy with the results. To complete the composition I added a few variations of quotes I liked from the Beowulf Saga.
This artwork is the first in a series of tributes to heroes and kings of antiquity I have planned (Real, legend or myth yet to be decided). My original concept was to create a digital art piece that was dark and brooding but showed the concept in such a way to be captivating to the eye. I wanted to use the skull again in my artwork which determined my original concept and this evolved into the work you see here today.
I’m already looking forward to my next project and working on a traditional rendering of this composition now. The rendered size of this artwork means I can view it in its entirety or blow it up so the skull fills the entire screen.
Takeaways from this project? It took way longer than I anticipated. This was mostly due to the learning curve using Zbrush. Will I use it again, of course!
The Process
You will notice a couple of small assets I made to complete the composition, the crucifix and the pentagram. Quite easy to make but of great symbolic significance. Once they are all aligned in 3D space I can export to Keyshot to add the lights and materials.
Move the dividers below to reveal the different lights used and the end result.
It helps that I”m a photographer in real life. Seriously, I’ve worked as a commercial photographer for a number of years which includes using studio lights. This means I am able to put my knowledge to good use by setting up the lighting in a virtual environment to achieve the results I wanted. Using spots and lighting panels in Keyshot I was able to create a dramatic lighting setup suitable for adding volumetric lighting.
Once I was happy with the lighting I added the materials to get a better understanding of how the light absorbed or reflected the lights.
The final elements were the volumetric lighting effects in Keyshot and then rendering everything out so I could clean up and tweak it in Photoshop. I wasn’t entirely happy with the full effect of the red light being refracted suitably by the fog in Keyshot so I generated some random cloud layers in photoshop and added a layer colour. I then masked them out and painted them where I wanted them. Creates a little more menace don’t ya think?
Other tweaks in photoshop included cleaning up stray clay brush marks I hadn’t seen from the giant’s hilt. I desaturated the colours too as I thought it added to the overall feel of the piece. You will see from the above before and after images I relit part of the dragon’s muzzle below the skull so that I could lighten the shadows a little. This was dropped in and masked as a separate layer in photoshop.
For the final image, I added a quote from Beowulf. There were a number of quotes I liked so I’ve created a selection to choose from.