Felegund amongst the Edain
“Long Felagund watched them, and love for them stirred in his heart; but he remained hidden in the trees until they had all fallen asleep. Then he went among the sleeping people, and sat beside their dying fire where none kept watch; and he took up a rude harp which Bëor had laid aside, and he played music on it such as the ears of Men had not heard; for they had as yet no teachers in the art, save only the Dark Elves in the wild lands.
Now men awoke and listened to Felagund as he harped and sang, and each thought that he was in some fair dream, until he saw that his fellows were awake beside him; but they did not speak or stir while Felagund still played, because of the beauty of the music and the wonder of the song…”
“Of the coming of Men into the West”, The Silmarillion – JRR Tolkien.
Technical aspects: This image captures the first meeting of Men and one of the High Elves of Beleriand – Finrod Felagund. Felagund was an Elven king of the Noldor, eldest son of Finarfin, brother to Angrod, Aegnor and Galadriel, and ruler of Nargothrond. After meeting the Men of Bëor, he long stayed with them, learning their language and teaching them Sindarin. Finrod is also acknowledged as the “wisest of the Noldor.” and was known as Nóm (“Wisdom”) by Bëor and his followers.
This image was begun in early January 2010, and makes extensive use of dynamic clothing in Poser 6, which I mostly learned when creating an earlier image “the Doom of Doriath”.
DAZ 3D’s Michael 3 formed the basis of the all the characters, with Hexagon being used to create the cloaks and gowns and then converted into dynamic clothing. The textures were all created by hand and UV-mapped using a variety of software.
The scene takes place in a forest at night, and lighting is by a single source – a campfire – which proved to be a big challenge. The figures were posed in Poser 6 and had to be exported into Bryce 6 individually as the program’s memory management is still poor even on a machine with 4Gb of memory.
Even DAZ 3D’s new Bryce 7 was incapable of managing this scene, and after a number of crashes, one of which corrupted my master copy of the scene, I decided to return to my methods used in “Parth Galen” and rendered the scene in several parts. The tree trunks just behind the characters were created with Hexagon and then a wonderful freeware software Ivy Generator by Thomas Luft, was used to put ivy on the tree trunks and on the seat beneath Felagund.
For lighting I resorted to creating a HDRI image of a forest clearing surrounded by trees and used Bryce 6/7’s IBL lighting to provide the ambient lighting, and then added few spotlights and parallel lights to light individual parts of the scene.
The final renders from Bryce were then composited in Corel PhotoPaint X5, and then various layers created to liven up the forest floor. Ron’s Flames Photoshop brushes were composited into the campfire, along with some “magical” fairy dust and sparks effects. A glare filter was applied to make Felagund’s face and hands “glow” – to accentuate the firelight. Finally the title and signature was added and the files reduced for display on a web page.
This is the last in my series of “Journeys into Middle-Earth”. The 13 images were first started in 2002 with “Battle of the Peak”.