The Reward Geek Sheet

There is a "trick" behind the "look" of this very simple picture: disable the sunlight!

Strangely and unexpectedly, you can still see the solar halo. Go figure... or ask the programmers.
Anyway, rather than complaining, I positioned the sun to the left, slightly towards the front, quite close to the horizon. The colour of the solar halo is a deep blue, the sky colour is black, and there is no haze or fog.

I then positioned a tight globular cluster of 14 radial lights to the left of the subject, slightly above and towards the front, to simulate the sunlight. Unlike the Bryce sun itself, this creates soft shadows. Often I need a lot more, but in this case I found 14 lights just enough. The further the lights in a cluster are spaced apart, the softer the shadows become, but more lights are required. Not enough light sources leads to multiple shadows. there is also a low softened spotlight in the camera position, pointing at the tree.

The hands are poser models, the tree is made from two DXF models with a terrain used to enhance the trunk. Most materials are made from flat colours. On the trunk and branches I used a DTE texture. The file size comes to 11.3 Megabytes.

Rendering took 20 minutes on my "Frankenmac", an 8600 with a G3 chip running 400MHz and a customised Backside Cache.

After rendering I tried to fix the (quite horrible) poser artefacts on the hands in Photoshop. I didn't quite achieve a result as smooth as I would have liked, but after blending in some noise for a more grainy appearance I was quite pleased with the picture.