I like longbows as weapons much more than swords, but i dont see many of them being made in 3D so I decided to make one to also help me learn a few things. This is also my first post on ZB. 
This is my first rendered 3D work, and my first ZB post. So far i’ve done realtime 3d game art, but now I decided to try out some of my new tools and see if I could learn to render some nice scenes. The longbow and the tree are mostly a test for me to see what it takes to make a high resolution 3D scene. Needless to say, I’ve learned a lot! I wanted to achieve a sort of rusty cast iron with the green bit on the bow. I know it might not be very functional if such a bow was used in reality, but this is more of an art piece anyway. 
I used 3ds max 7 and VRay, ZBrush, and Photoshop. ZB made it really easy to texture the bow because I had a very clean “baked” map from projection master. The wooden texture part was fully done in ZB. The bottom of the tree texture is photosourced, the branch and the sky background are from a photo. The tree is too low poly 
(only 850k) so some of the lower parts are edgy. I still didnt learn how to increase definition in only one part of the mesh and still have the displacement map render propperly. The bow is 6.5m polys, and I didnt have to segment it, ZB worked really well with my 2GB ram here :P. Also on the bow I learned that polygon flow influences how dense the mesh gets in areas when subdivided (well duh) so in future i know how better to prepare the low poly meshes… What else. The lighting is HDR. I also want to say that engraving the cast iron bit was really fun in PM using a tablet because the pressure sensitivity is great, it gives a real feeling of working with a solid material! The bow has a bump map over it to simulate irregularities on the cast iron, which I thought was easier to do than paint in ZB.
Most of all I learned how important it is to plan the whole process from start to end, and know exactly how everything is done, or else a lot of frustration, redoing and extra time will be needed. But if I wasnt patient I wouldnt be doing 3D.
Self critiques:
-The texture at the bottom of the tree is too high res compared to the mesh so it looks flat. I didnt have time to model the individual rocks, leaves and stuff lying on the ground but I could have if i wanted to. Now it looks kinda flat but I achieved everything I wanted with this render.
-Theres a tiny seam visible in the right detailed shot on the wooden part because I didnt use the function in ZB to get rid of seams on my texture. I know I could also fix it manually, but never mind.
-The lower part of the tree is too low poly, disproportionally to the upper parts. This was my mistake in planning poly flow for subdivision. I also didnt think I would have the lower part of the tree in my final render.
PS
Sorry for the long post.
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