Flickering Hope

This render was made to commemorate my 19th birthday. The primary theme of the render is to show loneliness, sadness, and hope. The original idea for the render was to have a larger scene with a second render showing the opposite theme of the first render. But due to some difficulties and stress that I had at the time, I changed it to a much simpler scene. The render was also directly inspired by my old birthday render. That's why the character pose is almost the same.

The scene is simply a room with two windows, a table (just a cube with a wood texture), a mini cake on a plate, and a character. I originally planned to use a muffin but later changed it because it wasn't as readable in the final render. I use an area light and a cube with a Volume Scatter shader to create the god ray effects. For the background, I use a custom night sky shader. As for the lighting, the primary key light comes from the candle flame and moonlight, with some filler light to add some highlights. I also did some rendering tricks to add candle flame reflection on the character iris. And after the final render, I just did a bit of color grading and added a vignette effect in the compositor.