Winter Solstice

In honor of the winter solstice this year, I created this piece depicting the sun slowly pushing back the winter cold.

The main scene is a Daz asset called Bend of the River, or something like that. I ported it over to iClone and adjusted the materials accordingly. There was an add-on material pack to get the winter version. I then added some more flowers and bushes to the spring version, and created the snow in the winter version using a duplicate of the terrain with a snow material and displacement map.

Both spring and winter versions were rendered in Iray using the Sun and Sky settings along with some saturation and color balance differences between the two. I also rendered out a stand-alone version of the Iray sun in a more pronounced placement in the sky for later compositing.

Lastly, I used Paintshop Pro with several mask layers and blending techniques to mix all the elements together. The end result isn't quite what I originally had in mind for this project, but the spirit of it is there and I love the result all the same.