Entry for the July contest - "dropping the handkerchief"

[susuexp]

Characters were built in MH using the muscular Proxxies. Everything else was done in Blender using mostly procedural textures, with only a mask on the blouse and an image texture on the shirt.
Overall I'm quite happy with how this turned out. I thought about adding some volumetric effects and I couldn't get the hair how I wanted it using particle systems, so I went with some more geometry there. I'm always happy about C&C.

[susuexp]

And I just realized I got the size specs wrong, so I gave it another render with the correct aspect ratio:

To add a bit to the motivation for the piece, I thought I'd be interesting to try to do a picture where the action is implied. Dropping a handkerchief was a traditional way to start gun duels, but using swords allows for a tighter composition. We are looking at a fight that is just about to start with only a fraction of a second to go before the hankie hits the ground. The poses suggest how this fight will begin (at least to me they pretty much spell out how the next 50 frames or so of animation would look like).