"Sunbathing" by Massimo Righi
Camera setting and Lighting
To set up the scene I created a camera and enabled the depth of field. To further explain how I managed the depth of field: I made a distance tool, placing one locator in the point of focus on the model and the other locator in the camera lens. I then parented the locator
to the camera so that when I moved the camera, the dimensional value also changed. The last thing I had to do was put the value in the Focus Distance field and give the desired F Stop (Fig.10a and b). Before working on lighting, I tweaked the shader networks, tried different specular/reflectivity settings and played with the translucence value. I used an HRDI probe, made by myself, a directional light, and a point light with Ray Trace shadow enabled.
Rendering
For the Mental Ray render settings, I used a Mitchell filter (which I believe is the best for achieving high definition and contrast) with a sample level, min=1 max=3, Ray tracing and Final Gather. I didn’t do any additional post-production work on the scene, only different angle renders. In the main image, I used more saturated and contrasted colors for the background and the alligator itself. In the other render (Fig.11) I tried more depth of field and less saturated colors for achieving, in my opinion, a more photo-realistic look.
Conclusion
I learned a lot throughout the making of this image, and loved playing with the depth of field, much like when I take photographs with a reflex camera. As always, after the making of an image, I tend to feel like it could all be improved further. For example, knowing beforehand that I would need to eventually do larger renders for printing purposes, I probably would have made higher resolution textures, perhaps around 4K. I plan in the future to work more with this alligator, playing with more renders and camera settings, and I would also like to animate him…so, we will see! Hopefully I have given an insight into the idea behind the creation of this image, and I hope it will prove helpful in some ways to all who are reading.
(c) Massimo Righi, www.massimorighi.com
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