Skygazing

The main inspiration for this render came when I was scrolling through Pinterest for some ideas and found a bunch of drawings of characters with the sky as the background. One of the hardest parts of this render project was the clouds, as I didn't want to slap an HDRI and call it a day. So I tried using VBD clouds instead. I originally wanted to render everything as one. But composition choice and problems with the lighting forced me to split it into layers, which are the background and the character. This meant I would need to separate the world shading and compositor setup from each layer. Also, during rendering, I found some artifacts resulting from the cloud VDBs clipping each other. So I was forced to render each cloud separately and then merge it with the background. In the end, I merge all layers in GIMP and did some adjustments as the character white balance is mismatched with the background.