Well here it is with extra lighting, added some smoke to the cigar for extra effect. :)
Hope you like it.

=D Much better. I\'m not sure about the glow in the eyes tho.

They need to be red, and glow in the dark slightly. He is a demon of great power.

Nice work but as the characters are the main focus of the composition maybe more light on the characters is required.

A great work JayBass, but yes, maybe it will need some more contrast to better define the main characters...

Which software do you use to make these amazing renders ? the detail level is excellent.

Thank you

Carrara 7 Pro, if you want it pm me for the links :)

The scene looks great.

I\'m not familiar with Carrara, but to accentuate the demons red eyes either a higher reflection setting for the eye surface texture material or a glow applied to the material should make them glowing red. So that they are more striking than the girls lipstick.

The billboard on the red brick house to the right has to high focus. If the persons in front are the focus target, the billboard and other distant things will appear a little blurred. Again, I dunno about DOF-settings in Carrara but there should be some options under camera properties.

The wine glass which the girl holds has that frosted glass look. Applying the car window material settings (without the toning) to it should make it more translucent.
The wine, in case it is a seperately defined material, needs a higher refraction than the glass.

Edit:
I dunno about the aluminium rims of the car. Are they polished or anodized/matt-finished?
For polished it\'s easy: high spec and about 0.3 to 0.5 reflectivity. The latter value depends on the light source and its composition.
For anodized look, the material settings of the demon guys black leather outfit are right. Only with a 30% to 40% gray instead of black of course.
With a main light source from top front left the right front part shadows are to dark cause of no irradiance or radiosity. Radiosity calculations will take the light scattering into account which is caused by all the objects affected by light sources and thus brighten up the shadows in the front area.
To blur the shadows beneath the car, especially the shadows under the cars bumper, an inreased distance of the responsible light source should help.

As for the suns angle of incidence I will go a little into details:
Depending on season and circle of latitude there are some characteristic effects on wavelenght composition.
According to the low angle of incidence and overall lighting this scene is set in the morning or late afternoon/evening on a rather cloudy day.
These facts given, the light is affected by the way through the atmosphere and the clouds (as well as air humidity). The longer path through the atmosphere duriing morning and evening hours has this filter effect on the light: low energy waves (IR to yellow) pass more easily, while higher energy waves (blue, violet, UV) do interfere with the atmospheric gases and are scattered (one of the reasons the sky appears blue), as well as with water (air humidity, fog, clouds), dust particles, etc.
This results in a higher ratio of red light in the spectra. During days with no or little wind in cities and other areas with air pollution the red ratio is higher before sunset and a little higher after sunrise than in areas with low air pollution.
The closer to the equatorial region you are, the more red there is in the light during said times. During winter, but only if it\'s cold and/or there\'s a layer of snow, or if it was snowing up to a few hours before, the red-blue ratio is more balanced.
Hence the light source representing the sun would have a higher red ratio for this scene.

Thats correct Zarat,

I have just started getting used to global illumination, and your correct its a lightly cloudy day late afternoon sun. Thing is when I use global illumination and sky lighting, the renders take a lot longer and I cant really see the quality of the light when i do a low res render if you know what i mean.... I guess this all comes with experience. I could apply a depth of field effect on the camera but I am going for a photographical finish and the distance from characters and car to wall is not big enough to empt a depth of field effect based on the zoom setting that I have applied. The reason there is a shadow falling over half the design is due to a building thats standing a few yards in front of them and it is a looming shadow. Also I don\'t want to make the eyes more red or apply more than the 5% glow on them that they already have. its due to the day lighting that the glow is not really evident. Obviously if some thing has a faint glow your not going to visibly see that during the day. Thank you for such a great crit, the applied science to lighting hints will come in handy on my next design effort.

You'r welcome!
It's easy to point out physical laws but their application in this type of CG is far more difficult. I myself fail most of the time and scrap a scene sooner or later.

You can - to some degree - fake GI/Radiosity by additional light sources (fill-lights) that cast no shadows. Computation of such a light is faster than GI if the fill-lights are not to numerous. In this scene there would be 5. 3 are optional and would be close to the white-brick house's ledge between 1st and 2nd floor to soften the shadow cast by the ledge.
The other two would be for the shadow of the car and that large shadow of the not visible house in front.
Softer shadows are a result of longer wavelenghts and much irradiance. (compare a shadow on a sunny day with that of a overcast day)
Using a skydome as lightsource is another way to fake GI and yields a pretty good result .

Another thing is color leakage. Faking it requires a lightsource which is placed mirror-symetrical to the key-light (sun). I.e. in case the Y-axis the vertical one, you would rotate the light by 180° ard. the Y-axis.
Light settings include max. 50% intensity of the key-light, light color is the same as the one of the source object (red for the red brick house, pale yellow for the white brick house), no or very very low shadow casting.

In other words make use of the lights fall off range to pull the right softer light effect on the shadow?
So i should add another light with no shadow bias/ do not cast shadows and light them and the car from behind with a soft red color to it? and same from the looming shadow source of the unseen house in front of them to soften the shadow under the car. I can reduce the strength of the shadow in the sun light to. And can give it a light depth of field effect, i dont want to loose to much detail.

So if I use sky dome lighting, i should get the same effect as GI and my render time would be halved?
Would I still get the same quality of light on the models? And would i still need to include ambient occlusion to get that realistic atmosphere effect?

It can help, but the distant object will suffer from it if it's decreased to much.
It can create some artificial lighting effect too.


The added light for the car can be in front or below of it. Dunno how Carrara handles it in the render.
If it comes from behind the car it will affect the translucent surfaces like windows of the car and may look weird.
The filler-light color would be more toward faded yellow because it's primarily defined by the key-light color and only a little by the house's color that's behind the car.
The big shadow cast by the house in front of the scene is affected by the red house.
However, the red house has virtually no effect on the shadows close to the car and no visible effect on the shadows in front of the car.


Reduced shadow strenght would only apply on an overcast or foggy day.
How about adding the DOF to the filler-light that simulates the color leakage of the red house? That shouldn't affect the other objects to much, if I understood you right.



Sky dome lighting in general will cause very soft shadows, filler lights will cause less soft shadows, depending on their brightness. The effect is similar to GI in terms of added realism.
The render time should be shorter, but how much depends on Carrara and your system specs. ATM, I have no idea how the rendering is done in detail with this app. The speed increase comes from the lack of shadow casting of the filler lights, the right material settings, so that only relevant surfaces are affected by the lights, and from the different way of computation for light vs. GI.
The quality is lower, but you can come close to GI, depending on the scene.
In this case I think it's a good replacement because there are no complex shadows nor are there many.
It certainly will have some effect on the shadow of the railing behind the car, but I consider this one as less significant to the whole pic, as it doesn't catch the eye anyways.
AO is still important for the characters. It can be simulated by 3 additional lightsources with small cone, limited range and strong shadows, but the result is different and I wouldn't recommend it for any detailed objects like the 2 persons in the pic.