Fantastic work. Here’s a link to a copy of the original copy.
http://www.crawfordartgallery.ie/pages/Sculpture/GrecoLacoon.html
A wonderful piece both in the sculpt and the presentation! The sculpt itself looks great, and the lighting with the surroundings along with the backstory in here in text really makes this stand out. 5*
@BlenderMatt:
I’ve seen a Laocoon sculpt, time ago, and besides that it likes me a lot, your image attracts me artistically first, then technically 
it depicts a great moment, it has power, an incredible mood. Again: well done. And i hope your computer is well. 
ps: can i use this image for my FB cover? , of course credited!
This is very well done, and I love the colors and lighting setup you used on this.
The only thing I think could have made this better is making a more realistic fracture where the column broke. Both the remaining portion of the column, and the fallen portion on the ground, would look better with a realistic fracture.
The sculpting and the scene really came out well and the volumetrics and particle dust add a lot to the render.
I love the lighting
in a word…WOW. Great job!
EXELLENT JOB modeling and lighting
thank you matt, as i said, you know much more about blender than me. this mist creation is fantastic, as is how you mananged to compose all parts. congrats to feature on blendernation too, well deserved 
Doris, thanks again for the very kind words I would say, however the stuff I know is all really just pushing buttons, nothing that took real practice
Great work!
They found this statue without Laocoon right arm and without the head ofthe snake. Firstly the arm was reconstructed straigt up, but than they found the original arm. The snake head it is not in the right place. Probably the head was in an upper position, near the arm, pointing to Laocoon neck. At last, probabily, this statue is not Greek, as they believed, but sculpted and buried by Michelangelo Buonarroti centuries later …
Apart from that…very well done!
Very good modelling work Matt. I can allmost feel the stress of rendering this scene!!
5 stars, no question! Love the lighting especially! Congrats!
damn, i thought it wouldn’t be possible to scuplt laocoön in this acurate way. Incredible work!!! I also like that you made just ONE scene with it.
Beautiful work, yet not too much samples. There’s quite a lot of noises, or is it only volumetrics? Now really there could be a slightly less SSS but it looks nice!
Name is Konrad 
We are gathering the best render of our clients
to put it in to our main site.
Will you agree to show up your render there ?
(of course we will honor you there as an author)
I’m waiting for respone 
Thanks
Thanks for your extra info! I was aware of the originally incorrect reconstruction of the arm, but I did not know about the snake head. In fact, now that I look at it, that would work very well - it would really support the composition of the statue in my opinion (post coming soon with some of my thoughts on that). It is funny to think that the snake is probably back to front all this time! I have not heard the theory about Buanarotti, it seems like there is still much debate about the origin.
I knew of a few of the debates, and that the story of Laocoon has a number of version, but I wanted to keep the text in my opening post as short as possible so I just picked what worked best for my picture, and anyone who has their interest picqued can then go and find out that there is more to the story than meets the eye.
Haha, yes, I can still feel the stress
Thanks
Cheers Not sure what you mean by the one scene though?
The non-volumetric layer is very clean at 4000 samples. The noise is almost all in the volumetrics. Some localised testing suggested that I would need about 16000 samples to get it clean. So either I have a lot to learn about setting up lighting to get the result without the noise, or the mathematics behind the volumetric rendering needs some further work. I expect the former has a lot to do with it.
If you think this SSS is too much, you should see some of my earlier versions, he looked like he was about 30 cm high because of the scale it implied haha. I reduced it quite a bit and it looked much better, I was quite happy with the result since it seemed to support the lighting effect I was going for, but I’m sure there was still some space for tweaking (most likely reducing) the strength of the SSS.
Aha! Hi Kondrad I would be very happy to see my render on your site. Let me know when it’s up there.
@Blender Matt what i mean is that lots of people create a really good model, but don’t present it in a good artistic way. You did a good job in presenting your work in only one great picture.
I thought I would share a little insight into my compositional process. Some may disagree with the ideas presented, but for me it was a means to create some order and reason behind the finished work. Please excuse the scruffy lines in the diagram below - it was drawn on the touchpad whilst on the train ;).
The beginning of my process was to determine what I wanted to do with the statue, and I quickly came to the conclusion that I would like to keep it as close to the original as I could. With that in mind I decided that I wanted to create my scene in a way such that is supports the original composition as well as I was able to do.
At fist I considered what were the main compositional elements of the real statue. For me it was the diagonal tension (shown by the white arrow below), it seemed to me that Laocoon was straining outwards in opposite directions along the line I have sketched. This made it appear to be a very dynamic pose, despite it’s obviously static nature. While the statue may well have been designed and composed with potential viewers at all angles, I made the assumption that the prime viewing angle was directly infront since the profiles of all three characters were so well visible from this angle. Ultimately I decided that I wanted to place the sculpture dead centre in my image, and that I would try and make the background composition work to support such a central image.
The key to that in my opinion was to counterbalance that tension (white arrow) with design in the background. The solution that I came to was to use something that fits in with the long abandonded look (a tree in this case), and make it pass behind the statue at pretty much the exact same angle reflected along the Z-axis (blue lines crossing white arrow). The broken column at the back is modelled as such so that the line of the tree also continues out that way (or more specifically so that if you are looking at the top right part of the temple it will lead your eye directly back down along that line.
The tree itself is purposefully serpentine in its nature - echoing the theme of the statue. This mirroring of a theme in the natural overgrowth is also present in the vines climbing up the pedestal and entwining the two figures on the left. The significance of the fact that only those figures are entwined is that Thymbraeus was the one that was thought to have escaped, so I have allowed him to avoid the constricting growth of the vines.
I next considered that I wished to have flowing lines that subtly join elements in the background and unify them with the statue. Take for instance, the orange line on the right, here I created the ivy such that it would create a curved line sweeping through from the right, past the Thymbraeus’ head a connect back up with the tree as it grows towards the light. The same was done on the left, but not as clearly, I did not want it to be too obvious on that side, so I made some small separations in the ivy that make a slight curve in from the left.
The two green lines of the vines and ivy on either side of tree show a mirroring of the initial angle of the tree growth. I didn’t do a very good job with the ivy on the column, but I wanted it to have subtle appearance of all three objects growing with the same initial angle (the ivy of course has to continue up the column). The centre column was removed to keep the Laocoons head framed by the branches of tree, and I placed it along the pink line (bottom right) to continue on the line of tension and mirror the angle of the tree (also creates a unifying shape up to the centre of Laocoon).
The two yellow lines around the hanging moss on the left show where I have attempted to frame Laocoon and Antiphantes to help draw attention to their faces. The moss on the right simply mirrors Loacoons arm with a vertical line and helps frame him as the central subject.
The circular pattern on the floor was an idea to unify the left and right sides of the image, it also helps draw the eye to the beginning of the two main lines (blue and white). The red line shows how the edge of the tiled section joins up the the two sides of the image (via left blue line on tree and pink line along the fallen column).
I tried to consider every detail that was added to ensure that it was complimentary to my compositional goal. Some things were considered just because I thought it helped the over aesthetic. Take for instance where the tree crosses the snake in the gap between Laocoon’s arm and body, here I made sure that there was a small triangle of light in each corner so that the tree was properly separated from Laocoon and the snake. Also, compare the clean render layer that I posted earlier in the thread, you will notice that I have hand painted quite a few of the ivy leaves to remove them from the image because they were catching too much light and distracting from the composition. A subtle vingette was added that mirrored the arc in the tiled section on the floor, this prevented the relatively high gloss higlights on teh floor and parts of the marble at the top left/right from interfering with the intended composition.
Some things I forgot to fix - I was supposed to flip the spider web next to the pink line, it was originally going to follow the pink line to unifu the pedestal and column along the line of tension…but that one slipped by me 
Anyway, I could go on for longer, but I want to leave some things open to interpretation 
I hope some of you find this useful!
There are plenty of useful resources for compositional ideas, but also plenty that I think miss the mark. Here’s one that that does a very good job of separating the good and bad imo (link).
