Ancient Gift

[SoldierofCatan]

This is a design for a book cover that I have been working on this past week. The book will be entitled "Healing: Gods Forgotten Gift". I'm not really the religious type but hay, at least its work.

[chunkymunky]

Quite nice but the intensity of the light in the box needs to come down a little as it's looking a little bit overexposed and blownout, the texture work of the vines needs alot of work, the leafs are ok but they are much too rigid at the moment, deform the leafs and you will have them looking much more realistic, you're vines just looks like they have a colour on them and nothing else maybe consider SSS at some point which might increase your render times but will also increase your realism, the smoke that is surrounding the box looks more like it is floating around rather than leaving the box.

[hulahuga]

You should have made this in time for "the gift of the gods" challenge .

Agreeing with chunky though.
What you might want to consider to though is how extremely straight the box looks...

[SoldierofCatan]

Okay, I've made adjustments to the materials and lighting. I also rendered this at a different angle so it shows everything better. My clients wanted the smoke and then asked me to change it several times and now they want it removed so this version does not have smoke. I think it looks better without anyway.

[FolkenBR]

Hi there,
The second pic is way better!
One thing u should do is play a bit on the leafs mats... and it format... so that they all dont look the same... right now they kinda look like planes with opac channels... Deform them a bit, play with their sizes etc...
Ofc, thats just my point of view!

The over all is great!
The pic is turning out really nice...
The second Camera position is a lot better as well!

Keep going! Great work!

[hulahuga]

I somehow liked the composition a bit more of the first image, but the subject pops a lot more in the second .

Agreeing with Folkenbeer as well..

[chunkymunky]

Looking much better but like I said in an earlier post as as Folkenbeer has said too you really need to play around with the leafs, at the moment they look exactly how they are a plane with an colour, bump and aplha map applied, you need to deform, warm, bend the leafs etc and also the green water droplets you have on the leaf's looks cartoony, it would be easier and better and more managable if you made some basic ater droplets from spheres and placed them manually onto the leafs. Just my opinion.

[SoldierofCatan]

Thanks for the comments. I only had a week to get this to the publisher so I'm out of time to work on it. They really liked the second image and I am quite pleased with it. If I had more time I would have definitely spent more time in making each leaf unique.

I spent most of my time getting the materials and lighting just right. I spent forever tying to get the sub surface scattering to work on a single plane (for the leaves). Its much harder than it sounds. I used an arch and design material with a two sided base plugged into the translucency slot to get the effect.

As of right now the author needed an image to take to the publisher. I'm not sure when they will print it so I may have time to put in the revisions that I would like to make. For right now though I am not going to work on any revisions because I am not sure if they are going to need them. My time will be better spent working on other projects. Besides, I did this one for free. Hopefully it will lead to some paid work.