It’s October. That means it’s time for some Halloween renders! What better way to try out the skeletons I got with the Anatomy 4 Pro Bundle than with a cemetery?

I started with Jack Tomalin’s Degeneration scene.



Let’s render that out to see how it looks. What an amazing artist! Have you ever seen anything from Jack Tomalin that didn’t blow your mind?



It’s huge. Just to show you, let’s pop a Michael 4 in there for scale.



As amazing as Degeneration is, it’s just going to simply serve as a backdrop fort this render. Don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll use it again in another scene. For the foreground, I dropped in another one of Jack Tomalin’s works: Parkside Heath.



I then started experimenting with some angles. I had a pretty good idea in mind as to how it should look. I’ve been thinking about this one all week.



Now for some skeletons! I added 20 skeletons to the scene.



I gave some of them some guts and used an assortment of Raw Warrior and West Park Insanity poses.





I then started to move the skeletons into position.



As far as clothing for Michael 4, he’s going to be some kind of wizard guy caught in the cemetery with a swarm of skeletons coming right at him. Spell gone wrong? Curse? Wrong place, wrong time? Who knows?

I gave Michael the Morphing Fantasy Dress. (Not just for girls!)



I then applied the Armageddon texture. It came with a cape and hood, but I though it was a little much. Besides, he looks badass with the bald head and goatee.



I then gave him a sort of “come and get it” pose.



For the background, I added a full Forest scene off to the left and the forest ground under Michael and the skeletons.



I added some Ambient Lighting and turned it down to about 60%. Time for a render to see how it’s looking.

Oooohh!!! Spooky!!



Michael is going to be throwing the hammer down on some of these skeletons. Since he’s a wizard, he’s going to be tossing fireballs or something at them. I needed to add some lights to the ones that have taken hits so they looked like they’re burning up.

I started to play around with it, but fire seemed to be too cliché. One of my kids suggested I should make them plasma balls, so I figured some kind of bluish/green magically-swirly things would look cool.

I proceeded to put point lights in Michael’s hands and gave them a cool bluish-tint.



A quick test render. That’s going to look cool!



I then started to add lights inside the skeletons. One in the rib cage, one in the skull, and one close to the ground to cast some light. There were about 15 lights in all. I even added a few spotlights in the background with a slight greenish-tint.



Sweet, now we’re getting somewhere! This is really starting to take shape.



I was liking the “come and get it” pose, but I wanted to have something with a little more action. I raised his right arm so it looked like he’s throwing balls of magic. I also scattered a few miscellaneous bones around the cemetery.



I then look the render into Pixelmator and started adding the magic.




For the two skeletons coming out of the ground, I needed a nice pile of dirt to add to the ground. I searched online and found this:



I dropped it into the scene...



…resized it, and made a few tweaks and color corrections.



All done. It came out amazing! It looks great on my desktop.



This is such an epic scene, I went ahead and rendered another one at a different angle. It was pretty hard adding the smoke and magic under and behind some of the bones, so it’s not perfect. Still, it gives me a few ideas for some future renders.