This is my final image for the CGChallenge Strange Behavior, entitled "The Strings of Love".

"In an apparent thrill for domination, Giovanni fell in love with its puppet. Will his wife Annabelle be ready to make the sacrifice of her own freedom to get him back?"

It took me more or less 3 months of work to get this done. Everything was modeled in XSI, some things like the clothes brought in ZBrush for further detailing. I used something like 30 lights to get the feeling I was looking for, often associating them with single elements to get the shadows and highlights were I wanted them. I rendered everything in one pass, although I did set up a lot of separate mattes to help isolating and adjusting the elements later in photoshop. An ambient occlusion was used for indirect shadows, but I also simply painted a lot of them, as I also painted a lot of the finer details that were a pain to get in the render. The sky was painted from scratch, using standard brushes. I used a few photos from cgtextures.com for the column and the floor. The high-res image was 2400x3692.

All in all, it's been a lot of fun and a great learning experience, although I'm happy to be finally done after working madly hard for so long. Comments are most welcome.

For a more detailed walk-through, feel free to visit my wip thread.