Hornet behind the scenes

It is time for another behind the scenes! :D

When I sketched out the recent Silksong piece I had already thought of making her skin super reflective like latex. I have seen a lot of fanart depicting her like that and think it looks really cool! :>

The problem I ran into was that I rarely paint leather or latex so I decided to make a little 3D mockup in Blender.

As far as I know Blender does not come with default 3D models BUT they offer a nice set of human base meshes to download on their website though. I used one called 'Body Female - Stylized' as a base and used the Sculpt functionality in Blender to mold it into a body shape that looked more like my sketch. I focused on making the hips wider, the legs and breasts bigger and the belly more pronounced.

Within the numerous sculpt brushes there is also a "pose brush" that can be used to do rudimentary posing. It is nowhere near as useful as a fully rigged and poseable 3D model but it is often good enough to do some very simple poses. I used that one to move the legs and arms and give the model a slight tilt.

After I sculpted the base mesh to my liking I made a simple dark material with very low roughness so it would strongly reflect the environment.

With the material applied to my new 3D model I did two lighting setups. The first one was just a simple HDR environment texture of a photo studio that I rotated until I got some nice white reflections that accentuated the round forms of the model neatly.

And for the second one I set up three orange point lights and a huge area light behind the model to create crisp rimlights around the edges. I did several iterations and renders within these setups. :V

In the end I did not directly use any of the images as reference material but was still mindful of the observations I made during the test renders. So they became more inspiration than a strict visual foundation of the drawing. Which is why the resulting Silksong piece has somewhat similar reflection patterns than the 3D mockups but still looks different. I also ended up horizontally flipping the drawing because it looked nicer.

That was me waffling on about Blender! :D

I do not use it all that much but when I do I am always glad that it is a reliable tool on my belt. :>