Storytime

My best friend asked for a private commission of a portrait of Zoe Castillo from the amazingly awesome narrative RPG video game Dreamfall Chapters which I created for him. (If you’ve never played it or its predessors, do so immediately! They are some of the best stories ever told in video game history!) After I finished it, I decided to create another artwork of Zoe for my own gallery to share with everyone. This is that other artwork. I’ve honestly worked, off and on, on this likeness of Zoe since 2014 but never got around to finishing it until now. I’m glad I waited as I wasn’t as good at hand-painting certain details onto textures like eyebrows back then since this character also includes custom made textures in addition to the face sculpt. The blue study textures are by one of my favorite digital artists since I started as both a fan and creator of digital art in the late 90s, Moyra. (Anyone else remember Moyra’s Web Jewels? I certainly do! Seeing the beautiful graphics on that site is what inspired me to start this madness!) The texture set was for D|S but I converted it to Poser 12 myself which was easy thanks to her texture map naming conventions and using the product promos as references. I’ll have to message her a copy of this so she can see how the conversion turned out!

As mentioned, I rendered this in Poser 12 with Superfly using about three lights plus an IDL dome. One light was a point light inside lamp, another was an area light to be the room’s main light source, and the third was another IDL light source coming from outside of the window. I decided against using depth of field as I didn’t want to blur out a single detail of this beautiful setting. The balance symbol on the window wasn’t added in postwork, it was rendered. I put the symbol on a flat plane with an ice shader and then placed the flat plane right outside the window and in front of the aforementioned IDL light source outside of the window. The lamp shade? Volumetric glass with a displacement map. The clothing is all dynamic; that shirt took about an hour and a half to calculate on top of everything and I still had to fix several errors with the morph brush! In postwork, I mainly just fixed a few little errors then played around with the colors and contrast in both Photoshop and Lightroom.

Most of these items are available from the Renderosity Marketplace (unless otherwise noted):

• STZ Small Room 3 by santuziy78
• In a Blue Study by Moyra
• Mila Hair & Hair Salon by Biscuits
• Dream Hair Biscuits by Dream9Studios
• Dynamic Comfy-T by kaleya
• Dynamic Tights for V4 ShaaraMuse3D
• Artissane Bangles by Fabiana