I'm back! Miss me?

This one is dedicated to . I told him I would rip off his awesome conceptual photography ideas and add my own twist to it... and this is it. He commonly uses glasses and liquid as a theme, as well as blood.


The idea presented is about how two ideals can cause a broken heart. The gravity on either side tugs and tugs until something snaps.

It's not meant to be like a real heart and real blood, if it were, I would kill someone and get a photo of it all in the middle of Hutchisons lab to get crazy gravity effects instead of rendering it.


Technical Details

Created in Maya 8.5 and Zbrush 3, and rendered with Mental Ray. A new l_Glass shader was used on the glasses and on the blood. Dispersion used on the glasses. Mental Ray physical subsurface scattering (miss_physical node) was used on the heart with about 500,000 photons for the inner scattering. Parti_volume used on the area surrounding the heart for the light to cast the photons into for the light streaks. Streaks are easier to see in various other colored versions, however I wanted to keep ^Davenit's style of fading white backgrounds.

I painted the background as an HDR from photoshop cs3. The camera in Maya had a Mental Ray exposure control to get the perfect look, since without it you can't really get a more photographic exposure range.

The heart shape was a very very low resolution model taken from my image Higher. Subdivided and sculpted the veins in Zbrush and exported back to maya.


Here are some pictures:

Here's the heart inside of Zbrush: Veintastic

Here's a shot from in Maya: Low Res Blood

And here's a shot of the lighting setup: Top secret
Lighting was a little tricky this time. Had to have a sphere surrounding the entire scene with a gray ramp on its incandescent fading slowly towards the behind of the camera. Then I had to have the HDR painting plane sit in front of that (the background that you see). Then I had to create three reflection cards, which I then shined lights onto to give a more non uniform look. Most people just apply surface shaders or lgiht shaders to planes (such as with the Maxwell renderer), but I shined lights onto them with a prenumbra and dropoff so that it was brighter towards the center (but still brighter than white towards the edges). It would have been possible to also achieve this effect via a ramp on the incandescent, but light's give a more effective style in my opinion and more control.

Anyways... enjoy

And don't ever get too conflicted.