I've been so busy with other projects, that I haven't done a render for several months. My last few renders were quick little one-offs. Nothing fancy.

I think it's time to jump back in and do something really nice. I decided to revise an old render from about a year ago. It's a scene that I never finished. It was supposed to be a Garden of Eden kind of thing, but I wasn't happy with the way it was looking, so I shelved it.

It stated out with a huge forest.



I dropped in Michael 6 and Victoria 6.



I took away some of the larger trees; the ones you'd never see…



…and gave Michael and Victoria a pose.



That's pretty much as far as I got. I didn't know what else to do with it, and I wasn't really happy with the lighting.



Fast-forward a year. Michael 8 and Victoria 8 have recently been released. This seemed like the perfect scene to feature both.

I swapped out the characters and put some simple garments on them. They'll probably be nude in the final render since they are supposed to be Adam and Eve, so for now they'll do fine.



I adjusted the camera and the depth of field. I wanted the background to be really blurry as well as the stuff that's really close up.



Since I'm going to render this out at 4000-wide, I did just a quick test render to see how it looked. The addition of the sky dome made a huge difference with the lights and atmosphere. It's a beautiful sunny day.



A beautiful sunny day calls for a ton of bright beautiful flowers. I went ahead a placed a ton of plants and flowers all over the scene.



Wow! What a difference! That looks awesome. You should see the full size render. It looks insane!



But it needs more.

I decided to try my hand at making some butterflies. It should be easy. I created 3 primitives: 2 planes and 1 cylinder. The cylinder I scaled down for the body and just colored it black. For the planes, I applied a butterfly wing image that I found online. I also made a transparency map for it.



That looks pretty cool! And since they're far away and a little out of focus, they don't have to look perfect.



I moved one over to Victoria's hand and used her finger as a point of reference to scale the butterfly to size.



I then made about 10 more butterflies and scattered them throughout the scene.



I also made about 20 more blue and red butterflies



That looks really cool, and since they're all over the place, some are in focus while others are not. It really helps establish a sense of depth.



It's crazy that there's like 20 butterflies in there.



Since this is supposed to be somewhat of a tropical paradise, it made sense to slip in a few animals. It's not that often I get to use animals, so I figured I might as well get my money's worth and drop in a DAZ Big Cat and some squirrels.



I dropped in a leopard and added the Look At My Hair add on.



Same with the squirrels.



Unfortunately, Look At My Hair no longer worked with Iray, so the hair didn't render out in the scene.



Squirrels without hair look kind of silly.



It's hard to tell on the leopard because the lights are too bright, but there's no hair there either.



There was an Iray upgrade for Look At My Hair, but it just kept crashing on my machine. I had to export the hair as an object and reimport it back in.



What a pain. The exported hair for the leopard was 1.4Gb. needless to say, DAZStudio kept crashing when I tried to import the leopard hair along with the 2 squirrels. The workaround was to create two scenes, and merge them in post.



I also dropped in a snake down in the bottom left corner. I wonder how many people will spot it.



That was looking pretty cool, but I wasn't happy with Michael and Victoria's hair or skin texture.



I changed things up and did another render.



I also moved some of the butterflies around again and made a few small tweaks.



Since it's such a huge render, I let it run for 5 days until I saw no noticeable improvement in the shadows. I then took it into Pixelmator and layered in the animals and the after effects.



That came out amazing. It looks great on my desktop.

Of course, I had to do the obligatory nude version, since they are supposed to be Adam and Eve.