Enlightened

After some years, this is the first project with unlimited creativity in which I can put as much as I want, with the highest quality possible, and showcase the exact idea I envisioned.
This is my submission to the monthly challenge of the Blender discord, the theme being "light and dark", the rest is up to interpretation. Thus I decided to create a concept of a split world, a mirrored world created solely based on light and dark, with a stairway in the middle going up from the dark side to the light side, some elements are repeated but altered in some creative ways inside the two scenes, the two figures in the middle, seemingly out of these worlds, glancing back at the thing they yearn, while going up, perhaps, to their final destination.

The composition is created bearing in mind that it can be seen from two different perspectives, and it still has to be readable and make sense, the whole scene was created using only black and white values, a couple of my limitations were that I had to remove all color and do it in a single blender scene, figuring out the techniques I would use to convey the perspective, effects, depth or focus that I wanted within those boundaries.

I also had some time constraints, only doing it in between hours and in three weeks tops.

Since my style is usually rather chaotic or cluttered, reminiscing of old classic paintings, I wanted to make almost all of it myself, putting into practice every single 3D skill that I have, including modeling, shading, texturing, procedural work, vertex painting and weight painting, characters, environments, effects, posing, painting, rigging, sculpting, post-processing, faked indirect lighting and forced lighting using light linking, forced perspective, camera manipulation and last but not least, post-production and after work working with passes.

I hope you like this little space of creativity I had!