PLEASE, watch high resolution and not compressed image (which is more than 4k) if you want to see all the details like peach fuzz on her belly or cheeks, little sparks, fireflies etc. The link is below in the signature, leading to my DA page.
Warning, mature content. It is not a first time when mature filter doesn’t work here. Can it be due to the fact I’m using Opera browser which is quite outdated and abandoned? Reply with Quote button doesn’t work either
Finally I’ve finished this pic. Took me a while to sculpt, render and compose all this stuff together. I started this project as animal (horse) anatomy practice, then I saw a picture of very cure girl and I thought it would be nice to make a likeness sculpt. And in the end I decided to change her facial features a litle bit and make a centaur. To be honest I never felt satisfied with this pose and it was made just for practice. I had totally different pose for the final render in my mind (I wanted to show her sleeping in the forest). Anyways, since I had this pose I thought it would be cool to render her with mental ray. I was bored already with monochrome or gradient backgrounds so I decided to make something more interesting. But I wasn’t expecting it would take so long. So my apologies for those who was waiting for the final image. Despite all this months there are still nothing special in it and I believe that overall it could be done in a few weeks (rathere than months, lol). But you know how this happens: you start learning new topic, resolving troubles, testing it and in the end complitely forgetting about the primary target. So I want to summarize what I’ve learned during this period.
- I’m much more familiar with female and animal anatomies (I did some forest creatures too, but didn’t include them here)
- Fibermesh isn’t so scary right now to me.
- Learned environment sculpting and texturing
- Learned paint Effects in Maya (truly awesome stuff).
- Learned fur system in Maya (this kind of experience I would like to forget)
- I’m more familiar with smoke and fire simulations in Blender. Plus expanded my knowledge about particle, fluid and cloth simulations.
- Learned a lot of cool ways how to optimize and render heavy scene on my crappy old PC (though it partially fried just recently)
- Skin shader is still far from being perfect but now I’m more comfortable with it.
- Upped my painting skills from total zero to 0.1
- And a lot of other useful information.
So yeah, almost everything here is 3D. Modeled in Blender and sculpted in Zbrush. UV’s were unwrapped mostly in Maya and UVlayout and rendered with mental ray. Composed in Photoshop. Campfire was rendered in Blender. The Moon was rendered in Zbrush with BPR. I also did volumetric clouds but in the end decided to paint them with brushes. My intention was to make very bright, colorful and fairy image. And I wasn’t striving for realism. Hence I intentionally didn’t include things like Atmospheric perspective, proper DoF and exposure in relation to my camera’s settings and lens.
The story behind the render. I wanted to show very nice and fairy place, something like a village where Centaur creatures are resting from the big city. It’s some kind of carnival or holiday dedicated to fire, when the streets are decorated by the red flags and lanterns, there are a lot of candles and campfires. This girl, tired by a big loud company decided to take a rest and invites a viewer to follow her. Everything is so illuminated and loud, so she wants to go into the dark forest. Seeing hesitations in viewer’s eyes she says that it would be funny and you shouldn’t be afraid. To make it even more intriguing, she takes her clothing off, looking at you with interest (as in the render), smiles and goes to forest.
PS This bulges in the bottom of her torso are just modified bellies of the rectus abdominis, connected to the expanded sternum (actually manubrium) of the horse (result of my speculative anatomy for centaurs). I did it mainly as a joke to tease a viewer. It is NOT genitals. I’m typing this note almost under every image, however I still often hear complaints like “Come on, dude, centaurs don’t have things like this”. To be honest this is really annoying. Centaurs are fantasy creatures and there are no rules or anatomy books telling us how they should look like. This is just my vision. And I like to break stereotypes. So please, don’t make me hear in 101 time that I should erase this thing. I actually love it 
I have perverted mind, I know.
PPS Big thanks to all who was waiting and encouraging me. It means a lot. Special thanks to Jacub for being super patient and checking all my endless WIP images. I hope I wasn’t very annoying with them :D.
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I’m fine and really happy that I finished this piece. Though I might come back and do several tweaks but for the most part it is done. Interesting, I thought that the composition is one of the weakest points in this pic (mainly because it was hard to chose between full height shot vs more close-up and portrait like orientation). Yeah, after this project skin shading isn’t such a big mystery as it was before.
