We wanted to start posting the SFW illustrations from "THE PHOTOSHOOT" as soon as we rendered them, but we thought it would be smart to wait until we had a few scenes to make sure the quality stayed consistent throughout the entire collection.
We rendered Scenes 01 and 02, and as we were preparing for Scene 03, we realized we weren't happy with the results we were getting. Something was missing, but we weren't sure what it was.
 First version of Scene 01 of "The Photoshoot"
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 First version of Scene 02 of "The Photoshoot"
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For Scene 04, we tried a different focal length and lighting setup.
We were surprised by the result. The old lighting was cheap and porny, and we hadn't even noticed until we saw the newest render.
Of course, we had to repeat Scenes 01 and 02 with the new focal length and light settings we used for Scene 04. Jeez, the difference between V1 and V2 is abysmal 😵
We're relieved we didn't post the first version right away because, after comparing them, we could see that V1 looked terrible.
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First version of Scene 01 of "The Photoshoot"
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 Second version of Scene 01 of "The Photoshoot"
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First version of Scene 02 of "The Photoshoot"
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 Second version of Scene 01 of "The Photoshoot"
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The next awful render happened in Scene 09 (a close-up on Lonan's face), where he looked utterly moronic for reasons we didn't understand. We went crazy checking why Lyhn looked so pretty in Scene 04, but Lonan was looking so wrong with the same lighting and settings.
It took us a while to find out that we had screwed up the Principled Shader for Lonan's eyes. We had connected a texture in the wrong socket, and it was making his eyes look, well, like in the photo below.
 First version of Scene 09 of "The Photoshoot"
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 Second version of Scene 09 of "The Photoshoot"
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The second thing we realized was that we had accidentally changed the clamping of the light from Scene 04 to Scene 09, and it was making the new light smooth and horrible, causing Lonan to look bloated and corpse-like 🧟
Sad truth, but one tiny parameter set wrong can screw up your whole render.
We're glad we decided to make this test with "THE PHOTOSHOOT" because we feel that we've learned a lot about posing, lighting, and rendering, and it has been a lot of fun 🥴
And we're happy because, by doing this project, we proved to ourselves that we can illustrate stories in 3D, and it's a relief because that's all we ever wanted to do!
