For the DOF, I rendered a picture in black and white, where the white was the closest to the camera and the black furthest away. I conceived this pass with the Default Scanline Renderer and a white Omni Light in Ambient only, which I turned on in the Advanced Effects, but without shadow. The Far Attenuation gave me the possibility to play with the black and white with my Depth of Field (fig.13). I then used this pass in Photoshop as a fusion mask. I duplicated my beauty pass and applied a Gaussian Blur. So, in the final, I created the DOF of my picture and played with this pass to darken the background of my illustration, with a Level filter for example (fig.14). I rendered some pass shadow to dramatise and intensify some shadows in the final picture (fig.15).






All the smoke in the final picture was painted with a personal custom brush. I added a layer for the gun's explosion to intensify the effect (fig.16). This explosion is the central point of this image, but it was also the most difficult part of the illustration and so I took time to make something satisfying, to me. I studied and looked at a lot of realistic references for this bit!


So, finally, I hope you have appreciated this ‘Making Of', and if you want more information about my working process then I'm entirely at your disposal – if I have the time…

Thanks, again!