The "Last Mile" is a composed image. I started working on it in late 2022 without even having completed the idea of that image. This streetcar is inspired by a real existing tram that was built in Berlin around 1913. Allthough Arnold Böcklin painted his series the "Isle of the Dead" between 1880 and 1886, I decided to combine both, the Island and the streetcar, in one image
I enjoy modelling in Cinema 4D very much. Unfortunately there is not much information about the tram on the internet, especially detailed closeups of the outer visual elements are missing. Anyway I guess I came close enough. After modelling and texturing in Adobe Substance Painter I did a bunch of test renderings with redshift in order to see what different lighting situations do to the surfaces.
The "Isle of the Dead" (original: Die Toteninsel) of Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin is almost a pop star among the romantic paintings. There are several real islands that are claimed to be the model for the painting, but none of them has this strict purity of the painted series. I used a bunch of scans that can be downloaded at Quixel Megascans and shaped them in Cinema 4D, just love the realistic textures.
The trees are downloads from LAUBWERK. I really like their plants and trees, but they should be rendered with a biased GPU accelerated renderer like redshift or octane. Non biased renderers deliver a rather unnatural look.
It may not look that way, but my model Astrid and I had so much fun during the shooting session. Unfortunately we both found the dress somehow too fancy. Nobody understands immediately the unusual shape of it, so I decided to reconstruct it in Photoshop. Which ended up in a file with countless layers ...
For the final image, I composed the Rendering and the model in Photoshop. The scene is taking place outside obviously, but I decided to use a lighting that produces very soft shadows. Many romantic or academic style paintings use this soft, in a certain way unnatural but very effective lighting. Studying the light that painters used about 100-200 years ago is a very powerful way of learning how to light a 3D scene.
