Night scenes (and Act VIII)

And with the work around updating Act VII+ finally done, and my new PC (hopefully) broken in, it's time to settle down and make the new characters of Act VIII. A lot of them have already been made, and teased, but I needed two new characters for a key scene. One of them is shown here, Kitsune no Ainu, a relative of Kitsune no Hakone, or Foxy, as MC usually calls her.

Here I wanted to experiment with night-time rendering; the obvious solution is to lower the light intensity... but that doesn't actually work well. It's a problem of dynamic range; our eyes are actually really good at adapting to darkness, and amplifying available light. It makes sense; all of our ancestors who didn't know how to see better at night either died hungry, or got eaten by something with better night vision.

The solution's multi-partite; because our blue cones are better at amplifying light than red or green cones, night-time scenes tend to look blueish. We can fool the human eye into thinking something is night-time by tinting it a little. When our eyes are compensating for low-light situation they also pick up actual light-sources stronger, so I bloomed the motorbike lights to make them feel brighter than they actually are. Finally the difference between the focus objects and the darker area around lends the whole image a feeling of night and darkness, without losing any of the details we wanted to retain.

This isn't really photoreal; I've found I like a slightly 'unreal' color palette, and I think it goes well with the magic theme. But the same technique could certainly be used to make more realistic (but still detailed) night scenes. Anyway, I'll get back to writing Act VIII... starting with the grand gathering, and continuing on to some old promises returning.