Desert Lightning 01

This is really the result of an experiment rather than a fully-planned image. I was thinking of posting it to my blog or to Scraps here but what the hell.

So where is Duster and how did she get there? Beats me, as I said, I was just messing about. Maybe this is where she wound up in a quantum variation universe where she stepped through a different doorway in 's mansion.

Technical Notes:

Aside from Duster the rest of this image comes from a single High Dynamic Range Image (HDRI). The landscape, the lightning, the lighting... all of it.

I haven't done too much with HDRIs, at least not in terms of having them show up in the image. When I started working with Daz Studio and was still learning I began using them as a very handy way to illuminate a large scene. Distant lights, I'd found, were problematic, casting way-too-sharply-defined shadows. And you can't really use the older 3Delight skydomes with Iray since Iray tries to calculate and realistically display how light bounces around and in a skydome the light gets trapped and bounces around indefinitely. Until I figured out how to use HDRIs to provide environment lighting I'd been tediously lighting larger scenes with several back-fill spotlights. Ugh! ...and Duh! But for most of my "digital career" HDRIs were relegated to that lowly backup role of making sure the dark alleys where Duster combats her foes were not completely pitch-black.

More recently I've been experimenting with lighting and using HDRIs as the main or even only source of light. One of the main results was this glamour image from a while back, which was solely lit by a HDRI:



I've seen other artists use HDRIs for full scenes and from what I could tell that approach has challenges. Often the characters looked like they were floating a few inches above the ground. Not bad if your character has the power of flight, but not good otherwise. That made me hesitant to use HDRIs for a full scene so I relied exclusively on digital landscape props instead. But apparently what is needed is a really top-quality HDRI specifically designed for use with Daz Studio, such as the one used in this image. The figure's integration with the scene should ideally look pretty seamless, as I think it does here. I was pretty impressed when this came out as well as it did.

Another advantage: working with the HDRI and little else was fast. This image took maybe 10-15 minutes, if that, from creation to render through postwork to completion. The full render itself took less than five minutes. Of course the new trophy wife PC and her speedy graphics card helped, but still, that's blazingly fast for a large Iray render.

It's always a bit of a thrill when you find another way to do things. I'll keep this in mind and look for ways to leverage HDRIs in future images.