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Huge improvement!
Ah, you have tugged at the heart strings of all Lord of the Rings fans.
Great use of DOF, and bringing in the bridge and exit adds to your story. I don't do Iray so I don't have reflection suggestions, but I have some other ideas:
Pose:
He is standing too straight which makes him look stiff.
Against the Balrog, the staff is his greatest weapon, so it should be forefront. The weapon stance is the left leg forward, right leg back, primary weapon forward, and secondary weapon back.
Start with the hip: twist it so the left knee and foot is pointed straight at us. The right leg will be spread and angled so that the right foot is perpendicular to us. Twist his waist so that the staff is pointing at us, then raise it above his head. Twist the wrist so that the staff is diagonal across the picture. You will have to fiddle with it so it doesn't block the exit. It would really be nice if we saw the tip of the staff, too. Glamdring can be lowered a little so it's ready to use. For more action, angle his neck forward because he is leaning in.
Expression:
Your expression is a good start, but to really show the 'heat' of the moment, exaggerate it. Raise the outer brows. Now open his eyes wide, because he's intense and really means business. Some of the most furious expressions I have ever seen are wide eyes and furrowed brows. Do it in the mirror and you will see what I mean. Curl his lips, bottom and top so we see more teeth.
Hair:
The Balrog is making lot lots of heat, and the exit behind Gandolf would also create a negative air flow - reflect this in his hair. Heat waves and the Balrog's bad breath will make his hair flow up and the draft will make it flow back. It will add more action.
Lighting:
The color on his face is good. Maybe some rim lighting on the left to add a brighter orange may bring in some reflection on the sword. Perhaps you can add the dirt on Glamdring in post work, so you can increase the reflectivity in the render. Maybe have some fire off camera for it to reflect.
She looks a little mad to me. Perhaps raise the inner brow and turn the corners of her mouth up slightly. Move her eye a little more to the left, and that should make the gaze pointing to the child. Try lowering the hat just a little, so we can see more of her torso and it will look like she is extending it toward someone small.
I've got version j rendering as I type this. I might have to post it after I get home from work though, I have to leave in about 30 minutes.
Thanks for your feedback, and have a nice day.
I respect how much work you are putting into this and the amount you are learning in the process! That's what the contest is about.
Huge improvement. Gandalf is just about stepping out of the picture.
If you want the sword to be more reflective, you could look at the Glossy Roughness setting on the shader you used. Less rough, more shine. Play with it a little and see what you think.
I finally found some time to step into the contest. Here's my first draft of "She'll Never Suspect."
The character is my evil faerie, Princess of the Night, so she fits the evil queen role of Snow White very well. She's undergone a complete makeover, as the first character was Genesis and this is G2F, which I rebuilt from scratch. I did use GenX2 to transfer the DD Ear Morphs for Genesis to build her ears. The costume is an exercise in kit-bashing. I love Shox-Design's metal shaders that come with Calla Cascade Hair - you should check them out. I made extensive use of them here.
This render in 3Delight is also an experiment with shaders. I wasn't satisfied with the 3Delight materials for Perfect Potions, so I used AoA's Metailzed Glass Shaders, diamond for the glass and bumped the reflection up to 500%. Now it looks more like its Iray counterpart.
The lighting is just a standard set of "Promo Lights" and is only temporary. I want to play around with UE2's light emissive settings for the potions. I want the contents of the cauldron to glow, but haven't decided how to do that yet.
Thank you for the pointers Dracorn, I will work on this tonite and post it as soon as it is done.
My draft didn't have much detail, so I did this close up so you could see her face.
Thanks for the great suggestions from everyone so far!
I changed the background to "DM's Cave of Secrets" scene, but kept the same DOF to focus on his face. It is definitely a darker scene, so I may still need to adjust the 3 spotlights further. For example, I'm noticing that his hair is blending with the dark background.
The right hand is grasping the fireball, and he is now looking at the camera (I used the "Look at Camera" script).
I also updated his expression based on some of the feedback for other portraits here. Let me know what you think. I kept his squeaky clean look because he values personal hygiene, and it's a new outfit!
Here's version j. Like I thought, I had to leave it running as I headed in to work.
Here is what I think is the final draft for this entry.
Here is my second entry, I think this is going to be the final draft on this one too.
Pulled back a little, and changed to a more "classical" style. Not quite sure why the horse's forelock is glowing so much; it's the same material as the rest of the mane, which is behaving quite nicely. Render still fuzzy because I didn't want to wait for it to finish rendering. Not quite happy with her skin color yet, either...
I was thinking that I would keep a closer view for a portrait, and render another for a scene.
The lighting is temporary, so I will definately be revising it.
Much better. That's an affectionate look on her face. I must say that this is one of your best renders, Saphirewild. Good job.
I imagine that the glowing forelock is coming from the backlighting - the sun. I really like the effect in her hair, so I recommend that you keep it. Perhaps you can move the forelock up against the horse's face so you don't get the halo look.
Perhaps you can warm up the lighting in front of the lady and her horse so her skin tone likewise warms up a bit.
Here is the scene with lighting... as far as I want to work on tonight. I've got the background lighting the way I want, but I still need to fiddle with the character lighting - it's not there yet.
I was thinking about the best way to do this, because I also want to render the full scene. Since I'm not interested in doing any post work twice, I will render the full scene, finish the post work in Photoshop, then export it to a JPG and crop it for the close up portrait view.
Nice candle lighting! I think the two jars/bottles beside her head are distracting from her face. I'd eliminate them, even though they rendered nicely. This will be an interesting portrait.
I set my renders in process as my wallpaper so I can look at it for a while and see what bugs me. Already I can see several things bugging me.
I have adjusted the lighting, replaced the bottles and changed the camera angle to offset the character with the background.
Oh, I think that is so much better.
I really like how this is turning out!
I have changed my pcture to portrait format and zoomed in on the girl more.
Ok, here's my next version. Thanks for great ideas @dracorn, and I agree that Gandalf's pose was definitely too stiff. I tried to aim for what you described, and personally I think it looks much better now. I changed that character is looking at the camera, and tinkered a little with the lighting, so that I could get something that resembles flames. I also changed blade's shader ( thank you @ewcarman ), to make the blade more reflective to the light. Unfortunately I was unable to get nice flames reflections, but I did manage to get pretty decent reflections from staff's "light bulb", that didn't wash out all the shadows. I think blade looks much better now, or at least it doesn't look like it's made of plastic anymore. All and all, I'm quite happy with this version.
What kind of a light setup are you using? Are you using 3Delight or Iray?
He''s looking good Mendoman. Nice touch with the blood on the hilt.
I am using Iray.