A rainy day near the beach

I have so many things to tell about this picture. First of all, I actually came up with a small backstory for the characters in order to make it easier for me to decide what objects to include in the picture. These three people are travelling from [some place] to the rebel camp near the antlion beach (the camp in HL2 where you get the pheropods). However, they have been staying in the small house in the picture for a while in order to stock up on supplies before they can move on. I won't write the rest of the story here, thus leaving more space for reader/viewer interpretation, but every single object in the picture is there for a reason (except the explosive barrel).

The label of the explosive barrel is in the exact center of the picture. It was done intentionally.

I put a couple of dirt emitters outside in order to try to make it look like it was raining. It didn't turn out exactly the way I wanted it, but it was good enough.

In order to get the glow from the muzzle flash, I put an invisible light inside it.

The antlion is a ragdoll. Antlion ragdolls are incredibly hard to pose. Luckily, I managed to pick an angle where most of it is hidden by the wall, so you can't really see how bad it's posed.

When it comes to colours and post-processing, all of it was done in-game. I messed around a lot with colour modification, bloom and super depth of field to make this picture. To be more precise, in colour modification I set the blue add value to 1 and the red multiply value to 3. I also increased the contrast, lowered the saturation, and lowered the brightness. For the bloom effect, I chose a blue bloom colour. All of this gave me a nice blue-orange colour scale. Actually, when it comes to blue and orange, I suggest reading this blog post I found a while ago. Seriously, if you read it you will notice it in every movie you see that was made within the last 30 years. Video games too, for that matter.

Addons used:

Enhanced Citizen Redux

More Emitters

Easy Bodygroup Tool