Crow 1 - The Awakening - Book Cover

Am starting to pull things together and produce higher sample renders to see how everything looks. I haven’t done the typography yet for the book-cover but have blocked out room for the title at the top and series name and author name at the bottom of the image, plus there will be an artistic border around the image - cropping a little bit of it out around the edges. Am still mulling over the lighting and colors. Everything rendered in Blender Cycles. Set rendered on GPU and both characters rendered on CPU. All renderlayers save for the fern in the foreground took around 17 hours each to render at 3000 samples. That’s after tweaking everything and the render settings for the best possible performance. Definitely need to get my hands on the latest 12-core Xeon and a pair of Titan cards.


I love playing with Blender’s node system. Anything can be altered. Having fun tweaking the colors and experimenting. I wondered what would happen if I emulated a full-moon look. Could make it darker or bluer, but Steven has unusually good night-vision after all… :slight_smile:


Cool Cover…!

Thanks! I have a polaroid-transfer type boder that will go around that too. Still very much a WIP as is the render. I will probably re-compose the foreground a bit too. That fern is too distracting where it is.


Another step in my cover project for Crow 1 - The Awakening. The dark and light layers of the polaroid transfer border will be replaced with dark and light portions of the image when all is said and done. Should look pretty neat, I hope. Replaced the fern in the foreground so it’s less obtrusive. I also keyed up the distance haze in the background too.


Here’s my simple scene nodes setup. I render to renderlayers, save out as multi-layer EXR files then pull them back in for tweaking. Keeps things simple in the long run - lets me shut things down to mull on it then return to it later to tweak some more.


Hi, Mike, nice to see how this project has evolved. And I still like very much. May I ask, what the reason was to have her half transparent? And his iris look very pale. That makes his eyes a bit empty.

Thanks. It’s been exciting. There are still 5 more book-covers I need to create, plus more related art so I call that job security. The more I write, the more art I need to produce. :slight_smile:

I’ve been looking at his eyes too and wondering if I should correct that in post or if I should tweak the textures or lighting. Will experiment…

Asherah from the start began as a childhood imaginary friend who he had forgotten was imaginary until the first major plot-point of the story. However, she didn’t just go away when he realized this and she persisted in remaining with him through the rest of the story, much to his consternation.

Re-rendering Steven with some tweaks to his iris and cornea and I forgot to put the direct light clamping back on. Indirect clamping is at 1.40. The bright areas are a bit blown out, but I think I like the overall effect better. It looks more like he’s in a patch of direct sunlight than the previous render. I may re-render with some adjustments to the lights, or create a contrast filter in post to take some of the highlights down just a touch…


Render taking forever. Would love to see sss in gpu soon. Anyway - adjusted eye textures and materials to make the iris stand out a little better. Put the previous version next to it for a side-by-side comparison. I also opted to clamp direct - hair was getting blown out too bad. I clamped at 5.0 which seems to be keeping the highlights fairly well - I can adjust in post when the render is done.


Asherah from the start began as a childhood imaginary friend who he had forgotten was imaginary until the first major plot-point of the story. However, she didn’t just go away when he realized this and she persisted in remaining with him through the rest of the story, much to his consternation.

I would think from his point of view…she would be solid. You might want to try having her be either more ghost like or solid.

Right now I don’t think the semi-transparent state is creating the kind of mystery that you describe … it’s very hard to understand from the current render. Until you wrote about it I just thought that part wasn’t finished.

Is there a reason he is looking directly at us? It breaks the world view…looks like he is posing for a portrait…if his eyes are focused off screen it looks like a captured moment. Unless you want that.

Thanks.

The intent with Asherah was to create a question. And it did. The second comment was to ask why she was half transparent.

I tried different eye positions for Steven and it just didn’t look right to me. The intent for him is to express a bit of irritation and intensity and the direct gaze does capture the eye of the viewer. Many book covers and even media covers - even Sintel - have the protagonist looking at the viewer. I’ll ponder on that some more, however. I appreciate your input and suggestions.

Latest renders are done. 2 days for Asherah - her fur really slowed things down. Mulling over it now. Most of the little things I wanted to fix have been fixed. Will sleep on it. I have to resume work on the typography now to finish the book cover.


Why is she transparent?

I heard it took you 48 hours to render… what. How much verts is that? I have never so long rendered a scene or even animation. One took 21 000 000 (21 million) verts without particle systems which simulated cloth hair bumps (I don’t know how to name them) and my GTX 560 ti couldn’t handle it so I used old processor intel pentium with 2.8 ghz and with full hd res plus a lot of passes and some other shit it was only about 2 - 3 hours.

Well, even Steven took around 17 hours. All on CPU with 3000 samples. SSS really slows the render-time down. Asherah’s fur and hair (and Steven’s hair) used a simple Hair-BSDF node-tree. But I also have SSS on her skin too. Which… isn’t necessary for most of her skin since it’s covered by fur. I may try it with SSS just on her face, hands and ears where a little bit of skin shows through and create a Non-SSS node group for the rest of her skin and see if that helps any. The mesh for her isn’t too dense - only about 21k verts plus whatever is added with SS set to 2.

Unfortunately, even with SSS soon coming to GPU, my SLI GTX560ti probably still won’t have enough memory to render them. For some reason when I go to GPU, the reported memory being used goes up a lot and I only have 4gb of video ram available. I could try trimming the characters more. Just about anything that’s not on camera has been cut away (or rather, masked away).

Here’s the node-group I set up for hair/fur:


And the node-group I set up for SSS skin


I don’t think most people know that without nodes, youve got not much. Learning them is so important. After all is said and done I like the way the girl fits into the scene…but the male? does not. It is out of sink with the figure on the left. This just comes with my past. And my visions of stupidity. But we try and help…Good job though. The males just not reflecting what the female is…Matt

Thanks for the input. This was actually intentional. In a nutshell, he’s the Earthling and she’s not. I’ll mull on it and see if I can represent that in a better way, however.

I wish Gimp, Krita and perhaps even PS would adopt at least an optional node-based interface. I’m far from an expert but I really find nodes to be a very dynamic and powerful way for manipulating the scene.

Decided her eyes were too dark so I have an opportunity to re-render and see if the changes I made to the rest of her help. I knocked out SSS from every part of her that is covered with fur and created a new node-group for those Non-SSS parts of her, so fingers crossed that makes a big difference in the render. Also… I just compiled GIT with the recent changes they made to the hairs that should also speed things up. Blender Guru posted a remarkable speed-up in a test he did.

I keyed up the main just a smidgen and plopped in a couple of really tight spots to highlight her irises better too.

Excellent question. One that I hoped would be asked by this composition.

Unfortunately, this is just the image for the book cover so it gives no background information. However, the associated blurb would help put the image in better context once the book cover is done.

In any case, she is from his perspective, imaginary. He forgot for a while, then was reminded of that fact painfully. Yet when all hell broke loose, she still hung around and caused him no end of frustration. When I complete the image I’ll post it with the blurb in the Finished section.