I did this entry in a little challenge over 2 months at the Danish 3D community 3dmaxer.dk with the strange and mind boggling theme "Surreal Reality".

"altruism" has a surrealistic touch to it and a deep message flowing through it as well. It depicts an in my opinion very important part of life, reality, in a surrealistic and symbolic way. Ultimately, it's up to the spectator what he/she feels it is about.

Rendering times ended up being about 7-8 hours for all layers all together in the native resolution 2868x1200 pixels. There is somewhere about 40.000 characters in the image, the biggest part rendered on 2D alpha planes distributed by particle systems. The foremost 40 characters are full 3D and posed by hand.

The image is post-processed and composited in Photoshop. The background mountains are hand painted here as well, and the sky is an image retouched and hand painted upon to remove some of the 2D look and add more volumetric feel to the clouds.

I'm very grateful for all the crit and feedback I got on various sites I posted this. Thank you very much!