Added a few more elements to the scene. Not too happy with the tree on the right, so will try and work on it tomorrow. Checklist of things to do: uv and texture Dracula’s collar, create sss maps for rats, and customizing hair/lashes for the female vampires
wow, coming along nicely! One grievance i have is that all the girl vampires are all too similar. The cloth is amazing but i feel their personalities should show more. The one at the bottom is great. The other 2 need a more dynamic pose like hers. I like the one on the left better with the pouted lips and she could use more of an arc in her back. The one on the right is just looking kind of bored.
Finally started working on the hair. Hair shapes modeled using nurbs. Then it is bound to the skeleton for posing and then tweeked. The nurbs patches are then converted to curves. Hair is then created using the curves.
Haven’t had too much time to work on this the past few days. With only 20 more days left, I guess that I will have to stay up later.
Hey Blas,
Awesome work!! Love the models, details and textures, fantastic mood on your characters. Great gestures and expressions, really great work!! Waiting for more updates. Cheers!! 
Here is a composite test for the scene. Had to use 3Delight to render the hair, hair_shadow, zdepth maps as neither maya or mental ray could handle the hair count on my computer. Still a lot of tweeking to do.
Thanks again for all of the comments so far.
The expressions on the Vampire women are wicked!! 
Love the little creatures around them, and the hair styling is looking great!
It’s great to see all of the parts of this coming together! It’s nice to see the hair: The wives no longer look like Centauri women. THe color of the woman in the front isn’t quite working, imho. For one thing, it’s a very non-natural color, and I think of ancient Transylvania as not being a place up on the latest hair dyes. (In other words a natural color would fit the locale more.) But also, color-composition-wise, it’s one of the only warm things on the page so it draws your eye right to her. Giving it a more natural color, say a black or a dark brown, would let the inside of the cape be the only red thing, which would help focus one’s eye right on the center of the image, which might be preferable.
But overall, it’s looking great. Good luck! 
Walrus
agree with you about the over bright red hair. I made an adjustment to it and toned it to a more raveny brown (Is that a color?). I started working to a few more of the tweeks - hopefully will be able to post an update tomorrow.
Thanks again.
Stuff looks great, I especially like the cloth. The characters skin looks a little plastic-like to me. I know they are not supposed to be living but maybe a little more sss on the skin would help sell them better. Once again the cloth is my favorite, very nice.
Did some more work on the poster design. I think that this will be the final layout - so it’s back to doing a bit more tweeking of the rendered image.
Getting pretty close to finishing this project. Here is a sample montage of the render.
Here is what the final poster will look like. Just a few more minor tweeks.
Thanks to everyone for the great comments and suggestions.’
Wouldya look at that, really starting to come together! The only thing that bothers me is the trees. They kind of pop and aren’t that detailed. Make sure you pay attention to everything in your scene equally, not just the characters.
aimanimation
I guess that you can see that of all the objects in the scene, the trees gave me the most problems! Will try to correct.
Thanks again.
Software: Maya,Photoshop,ZBrush
After the worldwide success of both remake of The Son of Dracula and The Unholy Crypt, SBI Productions is proud to present The Brides of Dracula. A lavish production filmed entirely in Romania starring Corneliu Constantinescu, best known for his role in the Romanian hit “Vampir Luna”, and co-starring Mimi Kaszas-Kardows, Vitoriya Vasiliev and Helga von Britt (of Invasion of the Killer Sexbots fame). LET THE BLOODBATH BEGIN!
Once again, the CG Challenges offered just what its name says - a challenge. Each challenge has been a learning experience for me, and even though I had a lot of other projects on my plate I am glad that I entered this one.
Scene modelled and rendered in Maya. I used 3Delight to render the hair, zdepth, occlusion and secondary shadow passes. The objects were detailed/textured in Zbrush. Texture correction and compositing done using Photoshop. The front fog/mist was rendered using Maya software and the mid and background fog was hand painted in layers and composited to both the textured image and the zdepth image. Hair was created using Shave and a Haircut.
In order to render the base layer (5000 x 3855) I used the Lay Tiles script, created by greyskull and downloaded from Creative Crash. The sss maps at that resolution still crashed Mental Ray, so I had to freeze them at 2000 x 1542 and use a fake sss layer during compositing. Scene uses 4 area lights and a night sky hdri. I used both global illumination and final gather maps.
I used Maya ncloth for all of the costumes. The grass is Maya painteffects converted to objects. This was my first time using 3Delight on a project (I usually just tested the deep shadows on Maya fur and Shave), and I was surprised at just how powerful this program is. Hopefully by the time the next challenge comes along I will be better versed in it. The final image is 6000 x 3924 pixels.
