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Description
Pinup gift for Elemarae's biggest fan. Happy late birthday Denis1704!

A week ago, I was experimenting with toon shading and didn't even know his birthday was coming up. Got a few interesting results, but they were difficult to duplicate and I ended up having more luck with more illustrated looks. To make a long story short, after getting frustrated with some realistic attempts on the other project I'm doing, I decided to just try going back to how I did this stuff 15 years ago: not worry so much about lighting, render masks for just about every surface in the scene, and pile on adjustment layers until it looked good.

That's how I'm going to do things again. I'm tired of boring, cold, and dark "realistic" render attempts; we can't reliably render true photorealism with DAZ content anyway when the figures are so often ten times more realistic than the clothing or hair. The simple illustrated test Smacky I also made with this method probably looks better than any render I've done of her in five years. When I heard Denis' birthday was coming up, I started testing a light texture quickly and put this together - sorry it's late and nothing too special though Each character may need careful and specific adjustments to look right in this style, but I still need to experiment more.

Hopefully this little reawakening will be the spark I need to start making more images again. And when they do, battles are coming; you Smacky fight fans have waited long enough.

Rendered in DAZ Studio, lots of fairly simple color correction in Photoshop CC. Thanks very much for viewing!

Description
Pinup gift for Elemarae's biggest fan. Happy late birthday Denis1704!

A week ago, I was experimenting with toon shading and didn't even know his birthday was coming up. Got a few interesting results, but they were difficult to duplicate and I ended up having more luck with more illustrated looks. To make a long story short, after getting frustrated with some realistic attempts on the other project I'm doing, I decided to just try going back to how I did this stuff 15 years ago: not worry so much about lighting, render masks for just about every surface in the scene, and pile on adjustment layers until it looked good.

That's how I'm going to do things again. I'm tired of boring, cold, and dark "realistic" render attempts; we can't reliably render true photorealism with DAZ content anyway when the figures are so often ten times more realistic than the clothing or hair. The simple illustrated test Smacky I also made with this method probably looks better than any render I've done of her in five years. When I heard Denis' birthday was coming up, I started testing a light texture quickly and put this together - sorry it's late and nothing too special though Each character may need careful and specific adjustments to look right in this style, but I still need to experiment more.

Hopefully this little reawakening will be the spark I need to start making more images again. And when they do, battles are coming; you Smacky fight fans have waited long enough.

Rendered in DAZ Studio, lots of fairly simple color correction in Photoshop CC. Thanks very much for viewing!