[Behind the Scenes] Mane Six Pole Dancing

This behind the scenes describes the process step by step which I took during this project. 

Blender

In blender I used a map that is described as a non-identical recreation of the strip club from Rainbow Six Siege. I don't play the game, but a sort of grimy strip club seemed like a fun idea to use. 

As I normally do, I wanted to use new models I haven't used before. As circumstances would have it, the NexGen MLP models for blender caught my eye. Originally hesitant because they're still a WIP, I tried it out anyway.

I found a good reference pose of a pin-up stripper sticker (something you might see on the back of a truck) and thought the pose was good, so I used that for the pose.

I wasn't sure if I was going to do the Mane Six or just one of them and have the rest hanging out in the background. But I learned that I can copy and paste poses between rigs, which made it easy to put them all in the same pose.

Well I got them posed up and decided to change their body types a bit. Giving each of them a little more personality. 

• Twilight's was sort of standard, increased the butt and boobs a bit but left it alone more or less.
• Applejack I figured worked on a farm, so she should be fit. Giving her some muscle tone and definition.
• Rarity is sort of posh, so I have her implants. Tried giving her that "curvy where it counts" look.
• Pinkie Pie I could have made chubbier because she works around food and cupcakes etc. But decided that she's more energetic, so she'd be more petite/light.
• Fluttershy is sort of shy, calm, and unimposing. I kind of imaged her as that one chubby girl from Stuffy Bunny (nsfw). So I made her a little chubby.
• Rainbow Dash is an athlete, so I made her thinner with some muscle.

After all that I thought I was pretty much done, but I wasn't happy with the nipples (mhm). I remember downloading a nipple pack — believe it or not — and wanted to try them out; Lots of options. So I brought them in and Figured out a way to attach them. It wasn't a perfect attach though, and I had to spot heal the seams a little in photoshop.

When I was done with all that I thought maybe I could add a dick to make them futas. I had been wanting to make some futa content but wasn't sure how to go about it. In SFM I'd just slap a dick into a crotch and lock the transforms. But with stuff in blender it's a little harder to make it look convincing without completely remodeling a model. But luckily It turned out fine in this case; probably due to the cartoonish nature of it. The dick also had a surprising about of options like patterns and things, which I took advantage of. 

Finally, right as I was finishing up, I thought maybe I should make a cum version too. I briefly saw a tutorial on using metaballs to make cum, so I gave it a go. Was pretty neat, but a bit tedious. I'll probably look into using meta balls as a particle, and have them popular in a designated space for easy of use and a more realistic/random fluid look.

You'll also notice an image comparing eevee render to cycles. While I do like the crisp look of the cycles render, the more photo realistic lighting is unnecessary for the cartoony subject. Not to mention the additional render time. The eevee image I think just looks a little muddy because of the bloom and other effects on it. If it had been rendered without those effects, I think it would look a lot crispier as well. But regardless, the eevee render did the job well and didn't crash my computer.

Photoshop/Post Processing

After exporting all the renders (had to do some redos because I forgot a thing or two) I brought them into photoshop. Immediately I wasn't happy with the balance of colors. It looks far too washed out, like the contrast/gamma was all wrong. A quick Levels adjustment layer fixed it quite well. 

I probably could have stopped after that, but I kept going. Eventually I added more layers that continued altering the composition to make the colors pop a bit more. The red from the lights was very powerful so I color balanced a bit to make the blues pop.

I also made a mistake during rendering which left the cum puddles wrong in Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash's renders. I didn't want to re-render, so I just copied them from Applejack's render and used a mask to overlap it. 

As mentioned above, I also had to spot heal the seams of where the nipples attached to the breast. I didn't want to do destructive work on the pictures though, so I learned that I can use spot heal on an empty layer, so long as "sample all layers" is enabled. You can see the picture attached as an example.

You may also have noticed the Rarity headshot in the photos attached. This was just a little experiment, but I tried to recreate the hair fur look that Hooves-Art does. I think it turned out not too bad, but I was just experimenting with it so I didn't add it in the final images.

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I actually originally intended them all to have the same pose (twilight's pose), but after consulting a few friends, they and I agreed that I should give them all unique poses.

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That's it! That's more or less the process I took for the project. I know I don't really do behind the scenes too often. Usually because I just forget to take pictures of it, and then I don't really know if it's even worth doing a behind the scenes to say "hey I did this pose, but then changed it to this pose." Not too interesting... But I hope this was at least sort of interesting. It's more like a blog post. 

Let me know what sorts of things you're looking for in a Behind the Scenes post and I can start trying to work towards that!