[kirbyUFO]

hey all.. been reading this board for the past few days now so i thought i'd put up some of my own work :)
hope the ubb code thing works heh
here goes:


so it's supposed to be an illustration from dante's inferno. here's the (translated) passage i was working from:

"At once with certainty I understood
this was that worthless crew
hateful alike to God and his foes.

These wretches, who never were alive,
were naked and beset
by stinging flies and wasps

that made their faces stream with blood,
which, mingled with their tears,
was gathered at their feet by loathsome worms."

anyways, all critiques and comments are welcome :D

oh yeah, the monitor brightness thing.. i showed this to my friend and it was waayyyy too dark on his monitor.. so i did a histogram in photoshop and most of the colors i used were in the lower 1/3rd of the spectrum. i know my monitor isn't properly calibrated (it's some micron model) but i was wondering what the best way to get around this issue would be, since i do want to keep it a pretty dark (brightness-wise) image.

[topeira]

looks fine to me. very pretty. very gothic. good work.

what prog did u use? how much time did it take?

good stuff

[extension13]

that is very cool

it is too dark (I have a tendancy to make stuff way too dark too, and have to adjust after)... did you intend this to be for print or monitor viewing only? You would want to adjust the brightness/colors differently depending on which.

was this photoshop only? or other tools? curious because I am not quite sure I can tell how you made it. Looks different.. its very interesting

[dr . bang]

i've always a big fan of your work George, welcome to the board!

[Maruman]

nice, i like it, however the girls wrist seems a bit thick, i like the last frame , verynice.

[sock]

boah, amazing pic!
no problem with darkness here, no crits either, simple really good work

[n8]

yumyum wormies...how long this take?

[Gordillo]

Cool!,very gothic.

[FireWalker]

wow, this is really great.

great subject matter (dante's inferno) and amazing interpretation. very stylish and chaotic, but clean, too. if there are more in the series, I'd love to see them!

[kirbyUFO]

thanks for the comments everybody :)

as for the technique, it's about half and half max and photoshop. i rendered out separately the body, wings, background, wasps, and swarms and shadowy figures (in the background). i had to fix up a bunch of stuff up in photoshop, hence the strange wrist (they were never attached in max). i also used photoshop to add the hair, blood, shadows, some extra texture etc. i used painter for the smeary blood around the edges, and maya for the floating feathers in the middle frame.

extension13: it's for monitor viewing only.. wasn't planning on printing it. how would you recommend i fix the colors though?

dr.bang: george? the name's josh hehe.. maybe you got me confused with someone else? :)

n8: it's hard to put an estimate on the total time it took. for me, modeling human heads and bodies is a pretty time consuming process that takes quite a bit of tweaking, so i usually work on it a little bit at a time. aside from that, everything else probably took a week or so to model, texture, render, and composite. sadly the compositing is what takes the most time hehe, because i usually only have a really vague idea of how i want it to end up

firewalker: this is the only one i've done, but it got me interested in possibly doing more in the future. if i do, i'll post em on here for sure :) this was actually originally going to be a group project for everyone in this little design group (of mostly local people) i'm a part of called newelement. everyone was going to pick a different passage to illustrate and present the whole thing on the site somehow, but most everyone else in the group is more design- than illustration-oriented, so i'm guessing it would end up as more of an inferno-themed web design feature. that is, assuming anyone else actually did anything for it.

[extension13]

ok for monitor, then i would just adjust in curves or brightness contrast on the flat image. I have a really good monitor, so I can see stuff really well, but anytime I look at my stuff on someone else's monitor, it shows up badly. So basically, I recommend you brighten it more that what you like on your own monitor. I turned up the brightness on mine to view yours, and it still looks good brighter... it holds up well. When you deal with viewing stuff on monitors, it's never gunna look like you want it to on everyones, so just try and find an acceptable medium. That's what I would recommend anyway.
I have learned to turn down my montor brightness pretty low so that I am conscious of how dark I make things.
Well, anyway enough babbling, nice work!

[darkgoth]

wow! That's fabulous! Really beautiful and dangerous.