Dark Elf - C/C wanted

yeah thats the only thing that really jumps out at me is there arent any shadows, the columns dont seem to be casting any either..

Wow, beautiful character and render! The light does seem a little bright and white on her. To me, her skin stands out as too much contrast from the background. She's gorgeous and detailed...she just needs the light toned down a bit and her skin/armor to reflect some of those lovely purples in the sky...just my 2 cents :)

I find her very hot, though I do see what the others are saying. Just had to put in my 2cents though ;)

overall - WOW

that said, the first thing that jumped out is that she doesn't seem to be standing on the ground. it's like she's floating, which could be a result of the shadow issue. Since i can't get poser7 to run on this puter (fucking vista - omg fyre cussed!!!) i don't know from a tech standpoint any cc that might help with that issue.

Which part of that is stock? Just the background?

Well by "stock" I mean I didn't create any of it. It's Vicki 3, with the "Onyx Elf" skin texture, Black Lotus costume and axes with "Era of the Black Lotus" texture, DejaVu hair with an included texture, Temple Ruins set prop with the "Darkness" texture, and Worldbase Extreme backdrop with one of its built-in textures. Vicki's pose is one of the ones that came with Black Lotus, and the hair pose came with with DejaVu hair. (I suppose I should get in the habit of providing credits, shouldn't I?) Anyway, all I did was drag it onto the scene, set some lights and take a picture. :) So by "stock" I just mean I bought them, I didn't make any of it, even the body and hair poses.

Thank you all for your comments and advice. I'll be working on this tonight, and hopefully I can make some good improvements.

yeah the main thing that jumped out at me is the lack of ground shadows =/ maybe paint some in there or something. The light isnt that bad you could just adjust it in photoshop by dup'ing the layer and set to multiply? I cant remember which one darkens hehe then playing with the levels. But the lack of ground shadows is really throwing it off I think more then the light issue. IMHO
She looks lovely tho :) very yummy

Oooh, that's not stock at all lol. Well to me stock means that premade 3d stuff that they have out there.

Nothing to add that hasn't already been said, but I like your camera point of view. Very dramatic!

I think she is the hawtness all around. I do agree wih everyone about the lighting and missing shadows. I think she looks a little disccnnected from her surroundings with out the shadows.

i dunno what kind of advice i could give you... your abilities obviously exceed my own :P

I think she looks great :)

Well, last night I tried to make adjustments following the advice above, but I ran into some frustrations.

I did discover that her feet weren't quite flat on the ground like I thought they were. She was hovering a few inches above the temple prop. So I dropped her down, and that helped with the "disconnected" look. But I still wanted shadows around her feet to really drive that home.

The problem was, I had a hell of a time getting those simple shadows to show up. The lighting setup has one infinite light and one spotlight in the front, and one infinite and one spot in the back. The front lights were set up to use ambient occlusion, and the back lights were set up to use shadows. What I wanted was some sort of soft shading on her figure, and shadows generated from lights behind her to be congruent with the sky backdrop.

But no matter how hard I tried, I simply could not get those shadows to work. At one point I put a strong spotlight close behind her legs, shining right down past her legs to the ground, but still no shadows showed up. I tried ray traced shadows and... whatever the other kind is called... but no luck. Yes, just to confirm, I had shadows turned on in the render settings and I got the "rendering shadow map" messages during the render.

So I tried turning on shadows on the front lights, figuring that shadows going the wrong direction were better than no shadows at all. But then I got a weird, ugly banding effect in her hair! I never got a chance to see what the feet looked like, cause once I saw the hair weirdness I just cancelled the render.

It's frustrating because the changes to the color of the lighting (as Diabolica suggested) really helped with that "washed out" look. The last render I did used ambient occlusion on all four lights, shadows only from the back. The hair looks good again, and the area around her feet looks better, but still not like they should. Still, I would have just gone with what I had except that I had changed the position of the front spot, and wasn't happy with the result. So tonight I'll put that spot back where it was and try again.

At this point I'm tempted to just try to do shadows in post, but my PSP skills aren't that great. (I don't have Photoshop.) Plus, I'm a stubborn sonofabitch and I want Poser to do what I want it to do! ;)

Anyway... thanks again for the kind words and suggestions. :) And if anyone has had experience with shadows not showing up as expected, or with using shadows in conjunction with ambient occlusion, I'm open to any suggestions you might have!

What you might do, is just postwork yourself with a soft edged low opacity brush in photoshop or psp.

I always have trouble with shadows, but I primarily use Daz, so not sure how to adjust settings in poser :(

Sounds like someone needs to play with Image Based Lighting (IBL). Vex really needs to write up a lil tut for it, since she's the one that's helped me figure it out. Course I still have to fuss at it most times ;)

That's a tutorial I'd definitely like to see. I've played around with IBL too, but haven't quite got the hang of it. But thanks for the idea, maybe I'll play around with that a bit tonight and see if I can get better results.

IBL tut?! /begs shamelessly

Check the 3d Resources forum, and please post any questions. it looks confusing or something, i suck at making tuts :x