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Taking @dtrscbrutal's advice, I have repositioned the camera a little, so everyone gets their fishing tackle in the picture. This is a more polished version, with a bit of DoF, some tweaks to the light, and a couple of sunglasses on the guy whose eyes wouldn't stop glitching out. (You can see it in the previous version.)
@marjoemartino I really like your picture! It reminds me of those non-Disney cartoon films from the 80s and 90s, that were a lot darker and scarier, and thus better than Disney's.
@sisyphus1977xx They're gonna be fish-food, aren't they?
Maybe they deserve it though, for hunting sharks with tommyguns?
@Shinji_Ikari_9th I'm always impressed with how good you are at dark scenes. That's my special kryptonite, urgggh! You always succeed at lighting them in a way that lets us see what's going on, but still keeping the picture dark.
@no_nose I actually like that he looks a bit shocked. Who knows what he's seeing in that photo.
@dragoneyes002 I completely agree that they shouldn't be freaking out, panicking and looting, but I think some grim determination wouldn't be out of place. A couple of them do look a bit "This is fine." It's a great scene you've set up, anyway.
@Coryllon It's a great start, and the only suggestion I would make would be that the heroine's mouth should be open in a sort of grin-snarl, and her brow scrunched a little more.
I feel your pain.
Before I bought the rig I use for rendering now, I used this computer, an HP Envy I got at Costco for $500. I used this computer for all things Daz for over two years, and two plus years later, I still use the HP for everything else. I'm on the HP now as I write this comment. It has an i7-4770, 16GB RAM and only the on-board Intel Graphics. A typical Iray render for me would take 6-8 days to be good enough I was willing to publish it. (I forgot to mention, I'm "a bit" of a perfectionist…)
I couldn't work with the viewport in Iray, but I could switch to Iray to check things, then switch back to make changes. Even now, with my render computer, I find I work in Smooth Shaded the most: posing, moving things around and so on. Even with a GTX 1080, working in Iray mode is slower than the other modes, and I get impatient.
And I think you're doing wonderful work with your HP. Shinji has a good point, though. You can do test renders at lower resolutions to save time in your workflow.
To check a specific area large, rather than rendering the whole image, select the Spot Render tool, open Tool Settings and enable "Render to New Window", Change the dimensions in Render-Settings-General to your eventual render size, then drag the tool across the small area you need to check. The resulting render window will only have the small area rendered, but it will be at the full-size you intend for the final render. (For example, and based on the dimensions you mentioned for this image, keep the dimensions at HD for test renders while working on the scene, set it to Ultra HD for spot render(s), then back to HD when you're through with spot rendering. When you're ready to render the final image, set the dimension to Ultra HD.)
I just can't help myself, can I? Second entry.
@TigerAnne I might make it look easy, but depending on the set I'm using it can be tricky finding the right balance of light and dark. Sometimes I can spend quite a bit of time just messing with the shader settings for the surfaces that I use for the lights. It's rare that I'll add a spotlight to things now a days, like if I have an old weapon from before Iray with a flashlight attached, but I can't isolate the lens as a light source. In that case I'll parent a spotlight pointed in the general direction as the source to the source (like a flashlight.) to cast the glow.
I finally have a render!
Had to find a soccer ball and texture it.
dformer for the soccer ball....many crashes.
dforce for the clothing....many crashes.
Had to fix some dForce clothing poke through in PS but otherwise all Daz render.
I've really always wanted to do a sports render and this is actually my first.
All done in Daz Studio. I am still working g with the lighting. I am not sure if I like it softer to give that fantasy feeling or if I want it sharper. Doesn't look like the HDRI works with default sun and sky in Daz so I will have to set up my own lighting.
@TigerAnne I like the new composition on your first image and the DOF looks great.
On your second image, I had to laugh at the expression of the character screen right, the "superhero charge" pose of the guy with the broom is funny too. Convention would say to ground all the characters, but I worry that might make the image less fanciful and humorous. It's something you could experiment with. Have you thought about having the animal character dragging a leash? Might add to the humor.
@ariochsnowpaw Your dForce and deformer work looks awesome! I can only see a few small things that might help. Personal taste here, I would like to see more of the center character's face, could be achieved with a slight torso twist and head turn. You might not need to redo your dForce work that way. Little things like adjusting the characters hair to impart a more realistic sense of movement might make this a stronger image. Extending and/or spreading the screen left character lower hand might help too. To my eye the screen left character's eyes would be locked onto the ball, but you should do what seems true to your vision on this. Is the shadow on the screen right character's face to show proximity? If yes, you you might consider playing that up more.
The expressions look very good, and the set/background is perfect. The lighting is excellent too. A very nice image.
@Coryllon That looks like a great start! Agree with you on the light, definitely could use more. I have found HDRIs tricky to add light to and still look natural. You might want to make the female character's right hand/arm more visible.
Very cool scene taking shape!
@dtrscbrutalv Aight. Now most of the characters are at least touching the ground with a toe or something. :) Except Benny, because he's running like he's never done before. I didn't have any leashes or collars, so the... dog is wearing a retextured goffick belt around his neck. The rope is a retextured piece of wire, from some set. It was the only detachable prop I had that remotely looked like a rope. I hope it looks okay. Click the picture to see Benny freaking the frack out in Ultra HD, LOL.
@TigerAnne, Fire and Ice, Wizards, Lord of the Rings animated movies, even Aeon Flux. Those are just the ones that came to mind when I saw your comment, yeah those were the good animated movies. It's a shame they don't make them like that anymore.
@L'Adair & @Shinji Ikari 9th, I keep forgetting about the spot render tool, as for test renders I normally just turn on the aspect frame and turn on Iray draw it in the viewport, that usually gives me a good look at the finished render. I normally work in texture shaded in my main viewport just because I like to see how everything either compliments or clashes, and to see if I have any poke through. I keep the aux viewport in smooth shaded to see the fine details that get lost in the textures and shadows.
As for rendering in lower settings I normally just use the standard resolutions, for this render it actually does'nt matter what setting I use it still takes 2hours 15min to render so I figure I might as well use the higher settings, then I wait to render until I go to bed so that I can work on other stuff. Speaking of which, I have a second render attached this time around just as a kind of "bonus" it is not a submission, I was taking a break a thaought Hmm...wonder what it looks like from that camera
On to this revision, I figured out the sword, it turns out that it was angled so that the "top" of the blade was in shadow, so I just had to rotate it in her hand to get the highlights. I brought the camera back to a more frontal position, this render is scaled at 3:2, I think it looks pretty good as a middle ground from 1:1 and 16:9, it opens up the scene and still keeps it "intamate" without the clostrophobia. this is my 4th render no.3 had the smoke to far back on her so I lost the DOF effect I had.
And I made a change to the wings, which brings me to a question that I have not been able to find an answer to here on the forums, I added subsurface shaders to the wings to get more detail because they looked a little washed out to me and I lost my emissions, if you look at my earlier renders you will notice a slight blue tint to the wings, I lost that with the shaders and there is no longer an emissions tab on the surface menu, by the time I noticed, I had done enough changes to bring it back that the undo list did not go that far back. So my question is: can I get the emissions back with the shaders or do I have to chose one or the other? I would like to have the tint back but I think that the shaders do make a good improvement to the wings so I am willing to let it go if I have to.
Here is my attempt for the challenge this month. Decided to go sci-fi and a bit of thriller/horror for this one. I was inspired by daybird's entry last month to go with a darker mood with this image.
!) I also did lots of texture work on the male figures at the end of the corridor, reducing detail and texture sizes. They are ugly up close but look good ( I hope) at distance. I had not done that kind of texture work before, and it paid off by being able to render three characters at once, something else I have not done before. dForce did not like the female figures pose and it took many tries and tweaks to get something that was acceptable to me. All the figure in this were posed without use of presets from the zero pose. I also did all the lighting myself using emissives and point-lights.
I had several challenges with this and ended up doing a bit more post work with GIMP than I wanted, the muzzle effect on the shooter character needed to be pumped up, and a massage on the explosion to get it how I wanted. The rest was all done with Daz studio and assembled in post. I had to render out four separate layers to avoid crashes, bloom filter beam/explosion glow, bloom filter set/background lights glow, foreground character (robot), and the three human characters in one render that took eleven hours. ( with no crashes, so
@Coryllon It is likely the angle that makes it appear like slight adjustment would work when it will not. We are working in a 3D environments after all.
Using the tree is a very sound tactic against a larger stronger opponent.
You are probably way ahead of me on this, but you could try a combination of pose change, tree size reduction, and scale adjustment of the figure to get what you want.
@TigerAnne Sometimes art needs to fly in the face of convention, I think Benny is a great example of this.
His expression and crossed eyes are awesome. LOL Super work with the kit bash collar/leash. It is a very fun image!
@marjoemartino I have found the iray preview to be rather inaccurate to what I see when I render out an image. It is a good guide line but I mostly do lower quality test renders to check my work. It's what works for me.
Sorry, I have little experience with the subsurface shader, but you might try going back to the original shader and adjusting the bump/displacement, and perhaps sub-d settings.
I think your latest render is a fine image, and a good compromise between the previous versions. The all have there strong points though.
I brigthened up the daylightand changes the shadow angles for the daylight... I would LOVE to elimatate the daylight and just use more disatant light, but it seems to make the shadows too crisp clean and dark like the ambient light goes away.The Pose is kinda stuck like that. moving anything even slightly you lose most of her face or she looses her ability to see her oppenent.
You can reduce the ground shadow intensity in the Environment Pane.
shadows as they are now are perfect. I just wish I could sharpen up the image.
You can.
Continue to tweak Pixel Filter settings until you like the spot render. (There's nothing special about Mitchell over the others, but someone I trust and respect likes Mitchell for sharpening. Seems like a good starting point.)
So the spot render made getting the general area userful for the tuning, but I need a full render for the fine tuning. anything long and thin becomes saw-toothed or sharpened to the point where were it looks like rows of pixels rather than a natural. So this will take some time :)
Im working on something for a friends character, the concept being that its a Tidesage. Which is basically a water elemental shamen type character from a video game. At this point, I am focusing on building the set for this magic user, and will soon begin sculpting the model itself. For now, the focus at this point to me is dramatic lighting of the model and also the partially sunken ruins. The magic items and even the water flowing from his hand are all props.
This is a WIP - and the render is low quality and not final.
A compromise would be to render the image twice, once with the defaults for pixel filtering with the softer focus, and once with your sharper settings. Combine the two in an image editor that supports layers and layer masks, using the mask to blend in the softer image over "anything long and thin."
Once you have finalized the scene, of course.
@Kimonolady Your image is looking pretty good! The one thing I see that could be a problem is the water flow prop. To my eye it is really blending into the background with your current lighting. I have not used that prop, but I suspect you could make it stand out more by putting more light behind it. Something like a fire or the spell glow/light reflecting off a background object.
The ground plane water looks great! Very neat concept and an excellent start. I look forward to seeing where you take this.
This seems like the best I can get with this. If I select a higher resolution will it tighten up the DPI to give me a clearer image? Right now I am using Active Viewport and Lynn HD I think is my character's base figure.
Fair enough there. As I said it was nicely done..I wasnt sure what you were going for, now that I do the choices make complete sense
Thanks for giving the details 
The additions look great. Everything seems to be working well together. If you wanted to play further (only if you feel like it) you could try making the overall lighting a touch brighter (just to see the items you added etc a little better) and then make the spotlights/extra lights you put in a little more intense so brightening the rest doesnt make those lose their impact. Very nice job on this
For the posing (if the pillows can be moved) I would try rotating the pillow he is leaning against to be more upright so its sort of bracing his back some and then you can sort of put his back against that which should help the posing. Can't wait to see what you do with the lighting and how it progresses
They are both coming along nicely. I did notice one additional small thing. On the image with the two men, the guy higher up holding the rail, his neck is maybe a touch too extended (I've done it myself...the neck can sometimes be odd to pose just because of how the falloffs are etc) You could try bringing the top part of the neck back forward just a touch and then tilting the head itself. That said, you've done a great job on the posing so its definitely not a big deal. Just a small thing to play with if you choose while you are adjusting the last bits. Both are really well done.
The additional pieces flying around look great 
Really nice. The flames etc and the way you brought everything together looks really good. The only advice I could give would be to maybe extend the sheild arm up just a touch so its not lost behind the sword arm (just to show a bit more of your details)
The only other thing is its a bit pixeled. Though it could be since this is a WIP you stopped it early. In case not (lower lighting sometimes can cause pixeling), there are a few ways to resolve it. The easiest way is to render the image larger (like double size) and then size it to the regular size you wanted (half) in an outside application like Photoshop or PaintShop Pro or another app you use for postwork etc. (Also a good tip in general to help get sharper images with less pixelation etc in general) The other solution would be to adjust some of your render settings for your final render. You can adjust the stuff under Progressive Render to help as well as settings under Filtering. If you have any questions on how to best set those, let me know.
You could also add one bright and close spotlight to her left side just to add to the depth/skin interaction of the flames. Really nice work, it is coming along really well!
PS I noted the discussion on the framing above. I really like the framing of the closeup you have going. I think it really draws you in and frames her very well. If you wanted to adjust it, I would extend the top and the the side with the wing out just a touch more (well out/up) to get a bit more in and put her a touch lower down in the scene but overall I really like the closeup personally (granted as with all art, opinions will vary so its all about what you feel looks best)
Very fun..lots of fun details (I can see the work on the characters that you've done morph wise) and I really like all the little details. (PS that is one crazy fish they just caught LOL) As for things to try, I might play with the camera a bit...maybe pull forward a bit more (to get more of the water and a touch less of the background - not tons just a little maybe) and then maybe play with the depth of field to blur the background a touch more (and maybe a bit more of the background) to draw your eyes more to the people. Very fun image