Tiaras for Dawn and V4: Tiara03 Gold and Ruby

Thank so much for taking the time to view my work.  A double thanks to any and all who take the extra time to comment and/or favorite. 

I apologize to those who I haven't responded to or commented on in the past couple of weeks or so.  My grandmother, who was an impressive 94 years old and failing in health, died, and I went north for the funeral.  I'm just getting back to communications now. 

As I mentioned before, tiaras are on sale at HiveWire3D.  I have to say a big thanks to the HW3D QAV team.  They go above and beyond.

This portrait series also shows off my use of a set of free paintings by Lynnp2010.  She posted them to her Renderosity account where she's lwperkins, and has lots of great images and some indispensable products.   I used variations on the same set up for the whole series.

I have an open cylindrical background prop with a texture on it I made with one of her paintings.  The ground is on, and has a simple matte material with a color that matches the background.  I also have an IBL with the bg texture as a source image.  I used the image node settings to stretch the image to cover the IBL map area.  That's on at about 50%.  I've got my "panel surround" prop (a set of very large and tall rectangles arranged in a circle) emitting light and providing reflections while being invisible to the camera.  That has an ambient value of 2.  There's a disc with the same properties above the figure.  All of that contributes to the ambient lighting.  The main light is a plain spot, warm (very pale yellow orange) spot with inverse square falloff and Angle End set somewhere between 40 and 70.  It uses raytraced shadows with a blur radius of 16, a min bias of 0.2, and 64 samples.  It's pointed at the figure's hair, and positioned wherever I thought it gave me the best preview.

I postworked them about the same as well.  I used the Z-Depth rendering option to render a depth map.  I copied that map and pasted it into a new channel of my main image.  I then duplicated the main image layer, added lens blur to the duplicate layer using the depth map as a control, then adjusted the opacity of the layer until I was satisfied with it.  In some cases, the lack of transparency in the depth map required me to tweak the mask in areas (paint a bit here, etc.).  I added a low opacity vignette layer, some color adjustment layers (curves and levels), and occasionally did a bit of hue shifting.

Even without the postwork, I found the light technique produced the results I wanted.  I was inspired by NightsongWS's promos of her set of Expressions for Dawn to experiment with lwperkins' lovely set of paintings, which she suggested using as light gels.  I plan to explore their uses even more in the future, especially when it comes to lights.  I always get a kick out of that.

Credits
ES Candy for Dawn by EyeStorm (Renderosity)
Dawn and her Glam Hair by HiveWire3D (free until the end of this month, just uncheck the other products if you don't want them)
Environment Sphere by Bagginsbill (free, his Google site)
Painted Abstract Backs by Lynnp2010 (Rendo, see her gallery)
Tiaras for Dawn and V4, Essential Materials 02 (WIP), figure materials, hair materials, and hair diffuse textures by kobaltkween