"Never trust mirrors" she said. "They never show what's most important."

My idea was to create a work of art dealing with the issue that communication between two persons is never perfect. Things look different, depending on which point of view one has.

I created the 3D-model in DAZ Studio 4.6. Basically, there are two characters that are similar, but different from each other. A sturdy wall of glass separates them from each other.

I created the material for the final pictures in Octane Render 1.29.

The starting point for the first picture. As any photographer can tell, this is a pretty hopeless situation: a shiny statue reflects very bright sunlight, hence some parts of the picture have been burned to solid white.

To deal with the problem I created a second picture with reduced sun power and higher gamma setting.

Here the picture C2 has been set above the first one as darken layer. More details are visible, but the picture is not yet good enough.

So, we have come to this: massive increase in gamma and steep reduction in sun power make all the tiny details visible, but the picture has flat colors and narrow dynamic range. Now we need a smart way to combine the best properties of all the pictures!

 

I chose to layer C2 on top of C1 as 75% transparent darken layer and C4 on top of that as 75% transparent multiply layer.

Here I have removed most of the textures and limited the path tracing depth to max 2 jumps. Also, I modified the glass material by removing its ability to reflect, to make sure I only get the shadows and nothing else.

The second layer, with no special tricks.

In the above picture I have added D2 on top of D1 as lighten layer. The result was too pale, so I added D2 again (as the third layer of the final image), this time as multiply layer.