Echoes - Episode 1 Preview

The sheer presence of the man who walked in made the entire bar fall silent, the grizzled old veteran one of the regulars and well-known by citizens and Outlanders alike as someone not to be trifled with...


This is the unedited base render for the preview picture I made for my recap of my group's Dresden Files RPG. This teeny tiny picture gave me more trouble than any render I have ever made, making LuxRender crash five times whilst just trying to load it to render. I took everything down to the bare minimum: removed all displacement, bump, and normal maps, deleted everything not within frame, and still had trouble just getting it to start rendering. I was going to have a back light in there to illuminate the figure entering too, but that made it infinitely worse (the effect would have required fog to look correct, and I was already pushing the capabilities of my system). For the final image, I ended up Photoshopping the hell out of it for that effect, but after all the effort I put into the base, I still wanted to share.

Set up in Daz|Studio, rendered in LuxRender, zero postwork (on this image).

Final (still tiny) image here, as a preview to my recap of our first game session:
Echoes - Episode 1: Pilot
Episode 1: Pilot

The Voodoo Queen: a bar and one of the few safe havens outside of the walls of New Detrick. The monsters may have appeared decades ago, destroying most of the cities and devastating the landscape of the Earth, but mankind was recovering. Some places fared better than others, becoming Economic Zones where society moved on, crippled but not destroyed by the apocalypse. Other places, like the city that surround the fort-turned-establishment, were left in nothing but ruins. Detrick itself only survived because it was a military base and readily defensible. It became a bastion of hope for the city's remaining citizens. Still, so