MadnessFM Collection Vol.1 Album Cover Concept

Another Cover for the MadnessFM channel, I'm once again grateful they requested me once again. The framing and positioning of this was based on a character in a short scene from episode 5 of the Madness Combat series.

This one tells the usual tale of something that started out simple, and ended up being a happy accident of complicated mistakes that worked out in the end. Originally I had intended this scene to be lit with my usual setup, a couple of lights here and there framing the character as best I could, however my curiosity got the best of me and I started to mess with techniques I wasn't familiar with, primarily ray tracing. This was rough, first of all I'm running this on a 3-4 year old laptop with a GTX 1070, which had only recently been updated to handle ray tracing (at least from what i found out), and second I had never messed with ray tracing before, I knew how it worked in concept but never had the chance to try it till now. What my laptop was able to put out was a very underwhelming image given that I didn't know much of how the functionality of Unity's ray tracing system worked, but I eventually tweaked it to be something I could possibly use. In the end I managed to blend together several renders with both HDRP lighting and the ray traced, which when combined with my weird style of editing in Photoshop ended up making something along the lines of what I originally envisioned, even if it still looks a bit rough.

There's plenty of things I would do differently next time, as I believe my lighting setup in this scene could have been better optimized for the ray tracing effects, and even some fine tuning of the post effects, but overall I'm happy with how it turned out.

Reference:
Krinkels (creator of the Madness Combat series) - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC64tqaIUdbAcOajtGHnV-qw
MadnessFM Album - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuf7semNrXI