The long stay at home

I want to show you the process that I follow to get this image. Many people asked me about the process and here is.  I am very happy to create another 'making of' for my favorite archviz website.
First that all, I want to show you the images that inspired me to create this series of renders. Since I do woman portrait photography, I’ve been very influenced by some photographers and painters. I love the dramatic light, which mainly uses one strong key light.

I have very clear what I want to achieve in this series, so, once that I have all my references, I start to work with all the concepts in my head, mainly light and color. I’m going to play with the framing once that I set the 3d scene.

I got the color swatches from the references using photoshop, with this, I have a very clear idea about the color palette to use.

LIGHTS, CAMERA AND FSTORM

Many people asked 'Why Fstorm?'. I know many people related me with V-Ray and Corona, but I'm always looking at which engine allows me to work faster, to get what is on my head in a fast way. I spend time learning other things, I don't want to know what is biased and unbiased. So I decided to test Fstorm and I love it, It's very simple to use, very intuitive and you get powerful feedback in seconds. So, right now I'm using Fstorm with 3ds max and C4D with Octane for my personal projects. But in my daily work at the office, we still working with Corona, and I love it too.

As you can see my scene is very simple. My goal is not to create a crazy monster scene, I don't have time for this. So there are just a few elements, and I render them separately because I want to have the opportunity to recompose the frame in post-production. 
The important things for me are: Use the same lens in 3ds max and my real camera, in this case a 50mm lenses, also the right inclination and position are important. The light with the same angle and similar size and the position of the model was important to make the match.

MATERIALS AND QUIXEL

My materials are very simple. Since I'm not working with an archviz interior, I don't need a complex material. I always try to work simple. With this project I explored the Quixel bridge, I strongly recommend creating an account on EPIC and you can get for free a lot of models and textures. It's like a dream, this makes easier to create great images.  Actually, I can see a lot of great images of people that just drag and drop stuff. Is this bad? I don't think so, in our crazy times whatever makes your workflow faster, means more money :)

Following the swatches colors and the style of the references, I asked my girlfriend, to use this dress with this specific hairstyle. I think it matches perfectly with the mood of the 3d image.

I would like to show you more about the shooting process but I lost a lot of information in my HD during this 'making of '. A tried around 6 posses, but in the end this was my favorite because of the direction of her arms. For the picture, I just placed the camera at the same distance as 3d scene. For the light I used a big octabox to create the window effect. I used a flash with low power to make it soft.

THE FINAL STEP
Use the slider to see the process 

I hope you like this 'making of'. Please feel free to write a comment if you want to know something about the process. I will be happy yo share more about it.