Hi
Is it just me getting old , or does Friday come around faster these days?
As we approach the end of October, we are coming up to Halloween. It is an ancient festival enjoyed by many around the world and a great excuse for children to dress up and scare each other, and for adults to join in. So this weeks challenge is to make a scary, spooky image using the scene below which is a 3D render.
Anything goes as long as it meets the forum rules on decency, copyright etc.
Anyone and everyone is welcome to have a go - whether you are a complete beginner or a Photoshop expert.
There are no prizes apart from the chance to practice, show off, or bring a bit of humour and fun. Don't be shy - come and have a go!
When posting back your edited images please use jpeg and downsize to 1200px on the long side.
To download the image below in jpeg format with ICC color profile (sRGB) and without the forum scaling artefacts , right click and then use Save Image As /Save Target As (or similar depending on your browser).
Have, spooky, fun !
Dave
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Another great rendering Dave.
Happy Halloween all.
--OB
What's Halloween without the Master of horror films Bela Lugosi!
Welcome Todd Shaner. I ran straight to the kitchen to fetch some garlic after seeing your image!
I struggled to keep the file size down with this, so it might take a moment to animate.
80,000,000,000,000,000
Hi
Some great images this weekend.
Todd welcome to SFTW. I would not want to come across him while walking through the graveyard.
UssNorway, that's a nice job with the lighting on the character matching the candle light.
Trevor, I love the animation particularly the piper, and I just noticed the message on the stone - funny 
.
If anyone is wondering what that large number is in Trevor's post, it was from a side conversation about how many operations a fast 2500 core GPU was doing when rendering for several hours. It was the mist that bumped up the render times.
Dave
davescm wrote
If anyone is wondering what that large number is in Trevor's post, it was from a side conversation about how many operations a fast 2500 core GPU was doing when rendering for several hours. It was the mist that bumped up the render times.
Dave
Dave, I read your comment and wondered what on earth you could be talking about? I read through my post a couple of times, but could see no number. Then, this morning, I saw it under the image. What happened is that I uploaded the image at 1200 pixels, but it was taking forever. A quick look at its properties showed it to be >6Mb, so I deleted it and pasted in again after downsizing to 800 pixels and reducing the colours to 64. Mean while I'd got the 80 quadrillion in the clipboard from our email exchange, and pasted that in by mistake, because I'd forgotten that we have to use the forum widget to upload frame animations, and I hadn't noticed that the 80 quadrillion was still there. You see what I mean? I am confused all over again! 
I'd also been trying to put that incredible number into context by comparing it to things like 'how many stars in the Milky Way galaxy?', but I eventually gave up because of the confusion over large number definitions. i.e. is a billion 1,000,000,000 or 1,000,000,000,000? The uncertainty over the how many stars in our galaxy also made the comparison more or less meaningless.
So the bottom line is that Dave's overclocked GTX1080 made an unimaginable number of calculations, over several hours, to render the Halloween image. Perhaps we should offer our own systems as part of a render farm for Dave's future SFTW renders? Or chip in to get him an RTX2080ti
I've just had a look round the latest Puget Systems articles, and the most relevant I found was for Octane Render. The Analysis proclaims the RTX2080Ti would only have a 30% advantage over the GTX1080Ti.
While I was over at Puget Systems, I saw a very interesting new article, but they deserves a new thread.
Haha - it's a good job you hadn't pasted something really embarrasing
Most renders are fairly quick. The increase in time this week was due to having 5 objects in the scene which used volume scatter to make the fog and mist. For anyone who uses Blender they were just objects with the Volume scatter node plugged into the material output and a texture generated to give the volume some variation.
Unfortunately this both slowed the render time and needed an increase in the render samples to keep the noise down and make it look like fog and not snow.
Dave
Hi
Very atmospheric Ged. I wonder if she knows the girl in Rista's image - one of her neighbours perhaps?
Jane - it's the famous mountain lion !
Dag - a bit harsh on Kodachrome , but I like the image and the movement in it. The lighting is right also.
Keep them coming. If you just stumbled across this thread - don't just sit there - join in !
Dave
davescm wrote
The lighting is right also
Actually not quite, but there are limits to how much time you can spend...the original dancing couple was shot in ceiling spot lighting, so you can see it coming in from the top. But close enough.
With such brilliant original material to work with, it's time well spent. Wish I could find a way to incorporate that mist.
Maybe not very halloweenish, but at least the dress color is right
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