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Description
After a longs day's journey on their quest for the treasure of Olbre, Queen Daenestra and Tryamon find refuge for the night in the Red Crow Inn. While eagerly planning the route through the treacherous Wallheim Peaks they failed to notice the watchful figure hidden in the shadows. Their wise old friend Ruehnar warned them as they left the village of Nya Alari "There are those who don't want you to succeed. The shadows will hear your plans and try to slow, or even stop, your progress.". Hopefully the figure in the darkness is not the shadows Ruehnar warned of.

This image is an entry for the Sword and Sorcery Fantasy Contest at DAZ3D (#MadeWithDaz , #DAZ3D , insta _daz3d). I actually had a really good idea what I wanted for the final image before starting to work on it, so my work flow was a bit different (usually the process is rather organic where I have a character, outfit, or environment I want to us, and the image is built around that). For this image, I new I wanted to use the Red Crow Inn as the setting for this story, so I created the two main characters by themselves first.

The general process was to first make the character. I loaded the base character(s) I wanted to use, then add morphs to make it into the character I really wanted. Then I added the clothing (as usual, a bit of kit bashing going on with the outfits). The figure on the right was based on Daenestra from DAZ3D, the figure on the left is a combination of Tillie and Topsy 8 also from DAZ3D (with several other morphs), and the figure in the shadows is Mabel 8 (without any mods - didn't need to do much except find/fix clothing for her since she is in the faded background). I created the two main figures individually in their own scene, then merged them into the scene with the Red Crow Inn (moved the environment scene to where the location I wanted to use was in the center of the scene to make adding things in the camera view easier).

The lighting is based primarily on the lighting provided with the environment with modifications to intensity, some location changes (the candles) and 2 spotlights added. One spotlight was added to enhance/brighten the light on the two main characters, the second is a rim light for the center figure. To give the smoke/haze effect I added a fog prop turned upside down (opacity reduced and scaling modified).

The scene was set up in DAZ Studio Pro Beta 4.15.0.14, and rendered using Iray. Post work was pretty simple (GIMP). I adjusted levels to improve light and contrast a bit. Added an unsharp mask layer, and used a very slight lighting filter with G'MIC, and of course added the signature.

The contest was a great excuse to take a bit of time out from RL and make a more complex scene. I'd love to win one of the prizes, but the reality is I'm probably not quite up to par with other entries. But that's OK, because I really enjoyed putting this together. I'm quite happy with how it came out, and the only way to improve is to challenge yourself!!

As usual, please zoom to full resolution to see the details. Thanks for stopping by!!!

Description
After a longs day's journey on their quest for the treasure of Olbre, Queen Daenestra and Tryamon find refuge for the night in the Red Crow Inn. While eagerly planning the route through the treacherous Wallheim Peaks they failed to notice the watchful figure hidden in the shadows. Their wise old friend Ruehnar warned them as they left the village of Nya Alari "There are those who don't want you to succeed. The shadows will hear your plans and try to slow, or even stop, your progress.". Hopefully the figure in the darkness is not the shadows Ruehnar warned of.

This image is an entry for the Sword and Sorcery Fantasy Contest at DAZ3D (#MadeWithDaz , #DAZ3D , insta _daz3d). I actually had a really good idea what I wanted for the final image before starting to work on it, so my work flow was a bit different (usually the process is rather organic where I have a character, outfit, or environment I want to us, and the image is built around that). For this image, I new I wanted to use the Red Crow Inn as the setting for this story, so I created the two main characters by themselves first.

The general process was to first make the character. I loaded the base character(s) I wanted to use, then add morphs to make it into the character I really wanted. Then I added the clothing (as usual, a bit of kit bashing going on with the outfits). The figure on the right was based on Daenestra from DAZ3D, the figure on the left is a combination of Tillie and Topsy 8 also from DAZ3D (with several other morphs), and the figure in the shadows is Mabel 8 (without any mods - didn't need to do much except find/fix clothing for her since she is in the faded background). I created the two main figures individually in their own scene, then merged them into the scene with the Red Crow Inn (moved the environment scene to where the location I wanted to use was in the center of the scene to make adding things in the camera view easier).

The lighting is based primarily on the lighting provided with the environment with modifications to intensity, some location changes (the candles) and 2 spotlights added. One spotlight was added to enhance/brighten the light on the two main characters, the second is a rim light for the center figure. To give the smoke/haze effect I added a fog prop turned upside down (opacity reduced and scaling modified).

The scene was set up in DAZ Studio Pro Beta 4.15.0.14, and rendered using Iray. Post work was pretty simple (GIMP). I adjusted levels to improve light and contrast a bit. Added an unsharp mask layer, and used a very slight lighting filter with G'MIC, and of course added the signature.

The contest was a great excuse to take a bit of time out from RL and make a more complex scene. I'd love to win one of the prizes, but the reality is I'm probably not quite up to par with other entries. But that's OK, because I really enjoyed putting this together. I'm quite happy with how it came out, and the only way to improve is to challenge yourself!!

As usual, please zoom to full resolution to see the details. Thanks for stopping by!!!