2014 Edit: Nope ... in the fourteen years since this was posted, the image is gone. The thumbnail I have is too small to be useful, so ... I'll fill in with some other horse renders. Sigh. If the original shows up on some hard drive somewhere, I'll return to this post and update it again, but for now...
Back to the original post, text-wise...
3D fantasy meets photo realism ... it would almost fool the eye into believing that this was your actual, genuine photo -- except that the "Garden of Eden" setting couldn't possibly be real, so you know it has to be artwork...
[snip -- image gone]
And here's where you start, with all the environment props you can get your hands on, as well as the Millennium Horse himself, and the CWRW pro textures. This one is a glorious bay ... he's just superb. The ground under his feet is the "floor" from the Easy Backgrounds kit (just click the icon to make the wall and edge invisible), with the "dirt" texture applied. Then, everything else ... every flower and leaf and blade of grass, plus the fallen logs and the boulder, are all added in as "environment props." Even the trees in the background are props ... then the whole thing goes out to a background image of a waterfall in a forest. One thing is missing in the above image: shadows! It's a nice shot, but there are no shadows underfoot...
[snip -- image gone]
Here's the same shot with the deep shadow maps turned on for all three distant lights. And suddenly our horse is casting shadows ... which, for me, takes a lot of sheer luck, because every time I turn on shadows, there is an excellent chance DAZ Studio will crash the PC to the desktop, and ... it's over.
There's only one major difference between this artistic rendering and the top picture, which is photo realistic. Depth of field. In a photo, if you focus on the horse with a 50mm lens and a medium- to large-size aperture (which you'll need, because you're in a woodland setting and the light isn't too bright), you get limited depth of field, so you couldn't have the flowers in the foreground and the horse and the trees all in focus. So if you were to fix this in your final render, you'd have the photo rather than the painting.
I leave it up to you to decide which you prefer!
Jade, 5 March
