"Memory"

The Idea

Though I live my life in the present, I'm very much influenced by the past. Past events and persons now gone (or at least not in immediate reach) had and still have an impact on me and how I see things. Along with a nostalgia for good times (I won't say better, not everything gets worse all the time), I tend to miss friends easily, and all this got together for this image. It's a life-loving person enjoying the rain, yet, she is gone, but the environment still reacts to her. It's as if there is still a space for her there.

The Objects

Using Poser 3, I just put a woman standing, arms spread out to embrace the raindrops. Her smile had to be exagherated a bit to make it obvious that she enjoys it, even without her body and face being visible. Then there's just a skysphere for the background color and roughly 38.600 simulated particles. 13.000 are used to place those tiny splashes onto her body, another 9.000 trickle down her body to give the impression that she has been standing there a little longer than just the initial rain-shower. 10.000 raindrops are flying within the scene, and 5.500 particles have been laid onto her face to make her smile visible. 4.600 particles have been used to drop onto the model and "explode" into the smaller splash-particles, they aren't visible in the scene but added greatly to the effect.

The Lighting

There's just one simple lightsource in the scene. To make the water-droplets more visible, they make use of a high specular value with low roughness (specular 1.1 roughness .02) so that there are tiny but bright highlights.

Personal Note

The scene itself renders rather fast, although most of the thousands of particles are placed within a single blob. Still, the simulation of 20.000+ particles required a few dozen minutes, making test-renders a job for the patient people. Personally, I like the sympathetic feeling this image creates.

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