It's been a long time since I've done a full-on render chock full of goodies. The last one was probably Pirates! I love doing these types of renders that have just a ton of stuff to look at. Let's get to it.

I've been dying to use The Enchanted Forest in a render. For a while there, I forgot I even had it.



It looks awesome.



I hid most of the scene so that I could see what was going on. I dropped in several characters, along with a few horses.



I then worked on positioning everyone along the bridge.



I then went to town on dressing them up and adding a ton of props. This is a test render with all the lights at their defaults. In the end, I want this forest scene to be dimly lit so that I can give them some torches.



I played with the lighting and added some torches and point lights.



It's pretty dark, but it's not finished yet. You get the idea.



I like to put little easter eggs in my images; just to see if anyone notices them. For this render, I put some skeletons under the bridge. Pirates? Smugglers? Who knows, but it looks like they met with an unfortunate end.



I then moved them into position under the bridge.



I also dropped in an old wagon and painted the textures with some browns and greens to make it look moldy and dirty. I then scattered about some crates and barrels.



That's starting to look like something, but I think the skeleton hanging from the underside of the bridge is a little much.



I snuck him into the back so he's a little less obvious.



I added more props, more lights, a flag pole, and some leopard cubs.



I aded the Look at My Hair extension to the cubs to give their hair some added realism.



That's looking pretty good.



I then took the final render into Pixelmator to add some effects. I started out by adding some mud and dirt to the horses and everyone's boots.



I added some smoke and fire.



For the Behemoth at the end of the line, I wanted the smoke to look like it was going behind the trees.



I rendered out another version without the background trees so that I could drop the new layer down on top of the smoke.



Same with the flag pole. I rendered two versions. One with and one without the flag.



That way I could erase portions of the flag to make it look tattered and worn.



I then dropped in some fog, bokeh, and fireflies.



Finally, some light rays.



Wow, this one came out really cool. Seeing it shrunk down to 620 x 348 doesn't do it justice. The original image is 2560 x 1440 and looks awesome on my desktop.