"Longing" Release (Patreon)

Hey all :)

Today I have for you a render I've been wanting to make for awhile, featuring Aerith Gainsborough from FF7. This concept was inspired by the Gold Saucer date from the OG game. By default, the player goes on a date with Aerith, although, depending on your actions and dialogue choices, it's possible to go on a date with Tifa, Yuffie, or even Barret, instead!

As for the render itself, sorry this took awhile. While this might seem like a fairly simple pinup on its surface, there were a lot of things that needed editing, polishing, and sculpting to achieve this result. This was also my first time making confetti and fireworks, and it took me awhile to dial in the look I wanted. The lighting gave me some serious grief as well, and I ended up re-doing the lighting from scratch several times before finally settling on a look I'm really happy with. On a more positive note, I always learn a lot from renders like these that challenge me, and that knowledge helps me to continue improving and make better renders going forward :)

Speaking of going forward, I plan to make a quick desktop wallpaper (i.e., landscape) variant of this render, which should be out soon!

As usual, the embedded image in this post is the 4K downscaled version, and you can grab the native 8K version from the MEGA archive.

And, as always, thanks for your support <3