The Witch’s Brew

This is my second entry to the 2020 Renderosity Halloween Contest of which this year’s theme is “Costumes, Cauldrons, and Concoctions”. This time I went for a more traditional approach to the contest and tackled the themes of “cauldrons and concoctions”. I used a ton of Superfly emissive materials to light up this scene. (Every jack-o-lantern has a ball prop with an orange glowing emissive material on it to create the glow effects. For more info, check my “Technical Notes”.) My mom again helped me by critiquing this scene when I showed her my rough concept draft. She suggested I add some “ghouls”. I instead added the skeletons which I think are adorable and hilarious. When it I showed her the finished scene, she liked the skeletons so, yay!

I rendered this scene entirely in Poser 11’s Superfly render engine with lots of emissive materials to create all of the glowing effects. See each glowing jack-o-lantern? There’s a little primitive ball prop inside each one with a bright orange emissive glow material applied to it which when rendered in Superfly, creates the effect you see in the artwork. There’s another ball prop with emissive material applied inside the cauldron lighting up the green goo. The fire uses more a more traditional ambient channel setup for its lighting effects. I used two lights; a soft orange area light in front of the scene to light up my main scene and a “sun” point light at the edge of the scene where the sun would be according to my sky dome. The sky dome also works as an ambient light projector. I rendered this scene twice, first the entire scene as I normally would and then I turned off all the lights (also hid the sky dome) so I could render only the glowing materials. I used the second render as an overlay in postwork to enhance the glows of everything. In postwork, I used my usual set of Photoshop actions to enhance the colors and contrast plus some additional adjustment layers. I also added the steam and smoke to the cauldron and fire using some of Rons brushes.

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

• D9S Vespera 2 by Dream9Studios