Making of "Dialogue" by Artur Rosa

In this image I was aiming at purity and simplicity, the magic of nature. The idea came to my mind when I was looking at some flowers in real life and I realized that they lived their whole life side by side. If they could talk, what would they talk about?
The layout of the scene in Vue is very simple: it consists of a plane with two ecosystems (grass and a small plant), two flowers and three trees to provide the shadow. The only light source is the sun, with soft shadows on.


The camera is set to 3% blur. The target of the camera is locked on a very small sphere that I hid from render. This sphere was positioned near one of the flowers. This method of locking the target on an object that I could freely move without affecting the scene, gave me more control on the exact distribution of blur and sharpness. After several trial and error iterations, I had found the perfect spot.
The light and atmosphere models are my usual, Global Radiosity and Spectral. As you can see in the screenshot, I lowered the quality boost a lot. This way, the render was much faster but the quality was not affected.

For the blur effect, I used the Hybrid 2.5D algorithm. The quality was already very good with 5 passes. The anti-alias settings were set at Optimized/Crisp/8/30/100%. The render time, with 1200 pixels wide, was about 8 hours on a quadcore.

In postwork I desaturated the colors just a little bit, to give it a more natural look, and I applied a little bit of sharpening in the area around the focal point.
Thank you! Artur Rosa