Miss December 2016 - WiP02

Hey again!

Think I'm good to go to assemble everything and then work on lighting. I'll polish the pose as I go.

The pic above shows the 3d element, Dva and her Mech will be lying on. I'll then use a screenshot from the game as a background and dump a truckload of lights into the scene ... pretty much the same setup as with the last pic.

Using screenshots in a render is not as straightforward as snapping a pic and calling it a day, though. There's two types of images I need to get from the game: One panoramic shot of the surroundings to use for the reflections and then a high res shot of the visible background. 

I then have to convert these into HDR images, cause that's what you want if you're working with images that are supposed to show up in reflections or contribute to the lighting of the scene. For the background image, I'll make screenshots with different brightness levels to assemble a true HDR image, but with the panorama image, I can't really do that, since it's stitched together from dozens of screenshots. Instead I have to manually crank up the range, which is less than ideal, but still way better than using a stanky jpg image. If you liked the reflections on the last pic, that's what you have to thank for that :D 

Here's a pic of the panoramic shot. Not very clean, but meh. Here it is again after being converted to an HDRI and compared to a jpg. The thing to note is how the brightest parts still remain visible after everything else vanished. And here's what happens if I light a scene with this map. Note how the reflections look much more realistic with the HDRI ... would be a lot better if it were a true HDRI, but like I said above, big step up from a jpg. 

Smut or no smut, if you want to make pretty things, you gotta do it right, I think.