Technophilia

"Technophilia" is the name of a series of very cool content packages originally designed for Poser and the Victoria 4 figure. I recently obtained a couple of them for free from the Daz store. (An early Christmas present from Daz! Thanks, guys...) Technophilia Volume 1 has the tentacle parts while Technophilia Volume 2 has a bunch of poses for both the tentacles and for Vicky 4. Let me tell you, posing tentacles in Daz Studio can be incredibly pain-staking and time-consuming, so finding a package of poses for them is a real blessing. As for the actor, fortunately Vicky 4 poses can be used on Genesis 2 figures (such as my girl Duster) with just a bit of tweaking to make them look right.

Above is the final image. I applied some Iray metal and rubber shaders to the tentacle to make it all shiny and cool looking. The rest of the set is from the wonderfully versatile Dreadworks 4 Core Pack. And of course the goons of Brute Force, looking on, are inspired by characters originally created by my friend and frequent collaborator EXitZero.

I thought I'd add a couple of other preliminary renders to share some of my process for those who are interested.

 

This is a rough render of just Duster and the tentacles. I had to adjust her torso and legs a bit from the V4 pose but other than that she fit the tentacles' pose perfectly. Then I did some work on her arms; the V4 pose had her flailing her arms uselessly but I thought it looked better if Dusty was wrestling with the vile tentacle. And of course I added her horrified expression. 

For the tentacle I added that "Head Implanter", as it's called, and then adjusted the tentacle position a little so it went where it was always meant to go. The Vol. 1 pack, by the way, has five other fun attachments: a claw, a needle, a saw, an eye, and a sucker. Next time I'll use multiple tentacles so I can throw in more of those toys.

I moved my camera around until I found what I thought was the perfect angle: one that captured her facial expression, breasts, and nether regions. I did the test render to make sure it looked good, which it did. With that done it was time to build a set around her. 

So here's the next step, adding the container tank from the Dreadworks set. I had to enlarge it a bit and bring down Duster's right foot in order to make her fit inside the glass. I tried applying Daz' default Iray glass shader to the glass but that horrifically distorted the way Duster looked. It's a funny shader, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

The Dreadworks set has some Iray lights built into it and originally I was just going to use those, but I did a test render (not included here) and decided against it. One of the problems I find with using Iray emissive lights as opposed to regular lights (spot lights and such) is that Iray lights seem to make the final image a lot grainier, and the render takes longer. Maybe when I get a better PC with more powerful graphics cards (as I plan to do next year) it won't be such a problem. 

Now here, just for the sake of comparison, is the final render in .PNG format.

Right away you'll notice that it's much darker than the final version. I almost always add a "screen" copy of the base image in postwork (using GIMP) which lightens everything up; it's faster and easier than mucking around with the brightness and contrast settings. Though I do use those for a "glow" overlay as well. The other thing I did, which I often have to do with darker images, is painstakingly use the "Despeckle" tool to eliminate all the bright pixels or "fireflies". If you zoom in you'll see them, especially on Duster's butt and the Brutes' chests.

Last of all I added my little logo in the lower right corner, a gift from another friend (and new dad), the incomporable RenderPretender.

Oh... if you check the file name you might wonder why I called it "Technophilia 02". Well, first of all because while I do have a "Technophilia 1" image created with Duster and the tentacles in a different pose, I didn't like it as much. But I may come back to it sometime. And second, of course I'm going to create more of these! There are 20 tentacle/Vicky poses in that Vol. 2 package! FUN!