Making of Child's Nightmare by Maciej Kotlinski, Poland

Room, Picture, Shadows

I didn't want to create hyper-realistic scene. I've made room very big to let wall with shadows overwhelm and surround the boy. Pictures are simply planes subdivided few times with textures from Mayang used as bumps. I made paintings in Gimp and Art Rage Free with my left hand (I'm right handed).

To drop parents’ shadows on the wall I created spotlight with wide cone and placed in front of it little plane with alpha texture of parents’ shapes. This let me control easily shadows position and size in final picture. In front of the boy I've placed big plane with image of parents’ shapes and behind it – white shadeless plane – to achieve nice reflection in boys eyes.

Chest of drawers with books was modelled quickly. Materials could be better, but time was running out. It has to ensure us that boy is in his room.

Lighting

I decided earlier that I don't want to create realistic picture. So I decided to not use any GI rendering engine, only blender internal and spotlights. It made rendering (relatively) short and gave more control over final effect. I used one spot to lighten boy's face and others to add some ambients in different colours, to add some atmosphere. Chest of drawers and the wall was lightened with two soft spotlights – one from above and one from below.

Here are settings of light:

I set ClipStart for “auto” for lights which I wanted to create very detailed shadows (also ShadowBufferSize set to 4096 helped here), and relatively high value for light shining from below, to let it create nice red ambient.

Post Production

I've rendered boy and background (wall + Chest of drawers) separately. I wanted to make boy's surrounding distorted (he's inside a dream) without distorting him too much. I applied lots of filters and blur on many layers (multiplied background) in gimp, composed it with many different blending options. I also made some curve corrections. Finally I've added little blur around the boy to make him connected with surrounding.

And that's it. As you can see – it's very simple. And as you can see you can achieve good effects using only basic techniques and free software.

I need to thank CGArena.com for starting this challenge and giving me chance to participate in it, and thank other challengers, who helped me create this picture (as it was work-in-progress challenge). Also big thanks for Blender and Gimp creators, who gave me great tools just for free.

Related Links

High Resolution Image - Child's Nightmare

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