October contest entry: Seventh Circle

[RebelFlyx]

Dante's neatly labelled pit of eternal agony, with its mix of christian and roman mythology, is one of my favorite go-to sources for supernatural imagery. The fountain depicts the outer ring of the seventh circle of hell, where the violent are immersed in a river of boiling blood, guarded by centaurs.

Made with MakeHuman, Blender and Photoshop.

The background image and the rock textures are from CGTextures.com

[hmcowboy]

Quick, close your eyes! Medusa has to be around here somewhere!

[Aethelraed_Unraed]

Really like this one, I love pics with a story behind it, rather than just fantasy. Dante just sounds so much better than "some random blokes and centaurs bathing in a pool of blood"

Only the water does some strange things (and looks kinda flat with just some transparency (seemingly) instead of a fresnel-driven mix of refraction and reflection. Do you use BI or cycles?), but the overall image looks just great!

[RebelFlyx]

Really like this one, I love pics with a story behind it, rather than just fantasy. Dante just sounds so much better than "some random blokes and centaurs bathing in a pool of blood"

Only the water does some strange things (and looks kinda flat with just some transparency (seemingly) instead of a fresnel-driven mix of refraction and reflection. Do you use BI or cycles?), but the overall image looks just great!

I used cycles. A few weeks ago I researched fluid simulation tutorials and made a quick test run, thinking the setup would be applicable to my project. Only when I finally got around to the fluid (on very the last day before the deadline), I realized that blender had a 10 Meter limit for the real world size of fluid domains, an my fountain was way to big. So, in a panic I spent all day trying out different setups with several smaller domains, and by the time got to the material (around 10pm) I was half asleep already... so yes, I'm aware of the picture's faults, and I'm planning on trying some more suitable ways to add the water, but this was the best I could come up with by last night.

I found this tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7zx0leNVik on youtube, which uses smoke instead of fluid, but I think that only works on a much bigger scale. For a still image, I probaly should have just resorted to modeling the water.

[joepal]

Slightly off topic... I never had much luck with fluid simulations and MH. I tried to make a shower scene, but it looked extremely odd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSsasG3z6I0

[RebelFlyx]

Slightly off topic... I never had much luck with fluid simulations and MH. I tried to make a shower scene, but it looked extremely odd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSsasG3z6I0

Hah, yeah, I didn't even get to a point where the humans were in the way of the actual fluid. I'd been planning on sticking some invisible and really lowpoly geometric objects in place of the humans as dummy obstacles, but the scene got so drowned that the figures were completely immersed anyway. The scale was just way off and I couldn't get the water any smaller. Like with your shower, it just looked like someone had turned on a faucet on top of a model landscape. At some point I found an article that suggested turning the baked body of water into a mesh and scaling it down. That's what I did in the end, sticking bits of meshified water on top of each other. The scale still didn't quite fit, and neither did the path of the water, but with some photoshopped foam to gloss over the worst of it I ended up with something I felt comfortable enough with to actually post it.

[duststorm]

Epic picture!
This is a very cool entry.

[RebelFlyx]

Epic picture!
This is a very cool entry.

Thanks