Oh my king, how cruel did fate toy with thee. The pale lady and her filthy fellows brought thy reign to end.
And thou, scintillant knights of chivalry, menacing rooks of foolishness, praying bishops of obsequiousness, thou that art the guardians of our beloved souvereign...where art thou?
Oh tyranny, oh joy, vengeance was bloody. Come hither and listen, for I will tell the hallowed truth...

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Have you ever thought about the background of a chess game? Why these two kingdoms have to fight each other? Is it a story of love, of vengeance, of glory, of hatred, of brutality or just another story of sheer stupidity?


Anyway, this is merely a "quick" training piece. Of course, if you know me, I don't like to do mindless stuff without a slight meaning, and so I tried not to leave my path this time as well. I have ALWAYS wanted to make a set of chessmen and now the time has finally come.
It is actually not very hard to model such a set, speaking of the staunton set, to be more precise (except for the knight, which is a huge exception to the style of the other figures, which are pretty straightforward). But nevertheless I'm a sucker in subsurf modeling and I need to practise some more, so, this challenge seemed just about perfect. But this was not the real goal I wanted to achieve, my focus rather lay on other things:
I wanted to try out the node system of Blender. So I used the compositing nodes to get all the passes of the rendering alone and used them to make the renders more shiny, to add subtle effects of AO and to add or remove shadows, soften them and whatnot. It was really cool, with render passes you can adjust the image in all possible ways.

Also, there is blood. I have never worked with blood before and this is a rather quick "hack" of doing it, but hey, I tried, so...


Too simple, you say? I say, simplicity is the key here. Let me know what you think and I do hope that you enjoy this piece
Let the battle begin!