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Description
I've had some questions about my 3D stuff - about how much of it is my work (some sites are very strict about 3D art because they don't consider it "original art"). So I thought I'd show what I start with and what I end with.

First off, I will never claim to be a 3D modeler - I don't make 3D models or rig their skeletons. I don't do UV mapping either. However, I can make my own materials and I know how to make simple 3D geometry and manipulate existing meshes.

I guess I kind of consider myself a CG photographer. I get a model, shape her body and make her up to look the way I want, change her face to be what I'm looking for, decide what hair she should have, pick out her clothes and tailor them especially for what I'm trying to achieve. Then I set up the camera, lights, focus, etc. Then I do post-work on the photo to clean it up, make it more visually appealing and give it a backdrop, title, etc.

So here I start off with a V4 mesh (with some built in morphs and a different skeleton/weighting for some anatomy correction.

The jacket is from an outfit called Freelance, I think. None of the clothes conform properly because of the tweaked skeleton. Something I had to work around.

The belt is C-Belt and the boots are C-Boots, both from Courageous for V4 (this outfit of Kitty's has a definite pirate/swashbuckling style).

The mask is a Black Cat mask, probably by Terrymcg. I combined it with a nun cowl that I mostly cut away to cover the forehead.

Hair is Aphirite Hair, which comes with some nice posing morphs, didn't really have to do much with it other than tweak some dials.

I used a skin from a V4 character and modified the materials myself. I made my own materials for all the clothing.

There was a base pose that's somewhat like this one that I used as a general base to get close to what I wanted, then took it from there.

Placed and tweaked the lighting, camera and focus myself.

Took it into Octane, set up my own subsurface scattering materials for the skin, fine tuned all of the materials and lights some more, set up some image based lighting, set some post-processing settings and rendered it.

Then took it into Photoshop and touched it up, worked on the face some, fixed rendering artifacts, tweaked color, exposure, saturation, etc. Made the background myself. Found a good font for the title and played with layer styles to get the look I wanted with the font (title in main image, not this one).

All in all, took maybe 12 hours? My computer renders fairly quickly.

Description
I've had some questions about my 3D stuff - about how much of it is my work (some sites are very strict about 3D art because they don't consider it "original art"). So I thought I'd show what I start with and what I end with.

First off, I will never claim to be a 3D modeler - I don't make 3D models or rig their skeletons. I don't do UV mapping either. However, I can make my own materials and I know how to make simple 3D geometry and manipulate existing meshes.

I guess I kind of consider myself a CG photographer. I get a model, shape her body and make her up to look the way I want, change her face to be what I'm looking for, decide what hair she should have, pick out her clothes and tailor them especially for what I'm trying to achieve. Then I set up the camera, lights, focus, etc. Then I do post-work on the photo to clean it up, make it more visually appealing and give it a backdrop, title, etc.

So here I start off with a V4 mesh (with some built in morphs and a different skeleton/weighting for some anatomy correction.

The jacket is from an outfit called Freelance, I think. None of the clothes conform properly because of the tweaked skeleton. Something I had to work around.

The belt is C-Belt and the boots are C-Boots, both from Courageous for V4 (this outfit of Kitty's has a definite pirate/swashbuckling style).

The mask is a Black Cat mask, probably by Terrymcg. I combined it with a nun cowl that I mostly cut away to cover the forehead.

Hair is Aphirite Hair, which comes with some nice posing morphs, didn't really have to do much with it other than tweak some dials.

I used a skin from a V4 character and modified the materials myself. I made my own materials for all the clothing.

There was a base pose that's somewhat like this one that I used as a general base to get close to what I wanted, then took it from there.

Placed and tweaked the lighting, camera and focus myself.

Took it into Octane, set up my own subsurface scattering materials for the skin, fine tuned all of the materials and lights some more, set up some image based lighting, set some post-processing settings and rendered it.

Then took it into Photoshop and touched it up, worked on the face some, fixed rendering artifacts, tweaked color, exposure, saturation, etc. Made the background myself. Found a good font for the title and played with layer styles to get the look I wanted with the font (title in main image, not this one).

All in all, took maybe 12 hours? My computer renders fairly quickly.