Spectral Ascent

September submission ohhhh yeah. This one packs a ton of effects, so many in fact that death is on the list!

The only thing old in this scene is Rainbow Dash's Cutie Mark. I built it a year or two ago and never edited it. I'm pretty sure I have a more modern version somewhere with way smoother sides....

A little story about this whole scene. The scene actually changed DRAMATICALLY at least 3 times. The changes were so intense that the entire scene is rendered upside-down. For the scene file itself, the VERY FIRST version was actually for the WOTW Typography theme competition, so I just threw in the worlds "Friendship is Magic". I threw it out a few minutes later as I figured it wasn't colorful enough, so I then spawned in 6 words of harmony. It stayed that way for a looooong time - well over a week. The scene was going to be similar to the 'big words on dark floor' theme I usually have going on, but it just didn't 'wow' me. I decided to play with Particles, particularly Pyrocluster, to get a new looking effect going. It looked cool because it looked like all the words were sleeping on the clouds. I had a thought and decided to hide the floor and flip the camera upside down and man did I love the way it looked. I was talking to my friends on voice communications at this point and one of them, ~Gweskymane , suggested that I add some grass to it and switch the particles to a fog look. I re-flipped the camera to zero rotation and tossed in realistic grass. Now, the problem with this move is that a LOT of these effects don't go well together. Global Illumination and Hair/Grass render don't play well together. Global Illumination and Particles don't play well together. Particles and Hair/Grass I have never tried before. With all three of these effects in play, my render times suffered. It was taking 20 minutes at a time just to get a preview and my computer was obviously under immense stress. Coincidentally, I lost control of my computer because one of my hard drives failed (my D: drive). It would seem like the unworldly workload on my computer murdered my hard drive, but the two events are just coincidental. The drive that died was one that I found (in a trashed computer). Pulled the drive out and all was well. I lost all my icons and my vector files but all my 3D stuff was safe.

Because of this unexpected death, I had abandoned the scene for a long time. I eventually missed the competition deadline the render was due for. Luckily, the following week's theme was Clouds and Mist. By falling behind, I was a step ahead. Since I no longer needed words, I took out all the words and replaced them with one word, Loyalty. I exploded them, gave them a rainbow spectrum and inserted the cutie mark dead center. Added a full light-rig, custom created rain, and voila. The final product.

No task within this project was easy, but it sure payed off.

Rendered on AMD Phenom 1090T x6 3.2Ghz & AMD FX-8350 x8 4Ghz. Total render time 11 hours (and that's with a TON of optimization).
Cinema 4D R14 using Physical Renderer at MEDIUM settings (not even high)!

If anybody needs a LARGER size, leave a comment with the requested resolution and I'll render it out. It'll only take about a full day.

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I had just forgotten that September 7th marks the day I had joined DeviantArt and submitted my first piece of work - another Rainbow Dash bit. Back then I was still using Photoshop with Cinema 4D as a backup. Now, I don't even have Photoshop anymore and Cinema4D is my main runner. A lot has happened in two years, comparing both Sep7 works. Thanks for over 7,000 page views.