Process of making a Pinup/Caption (Patreon)

Heya everyone,

I hope you're all enjoying these extra images. I'm mainly making them to keep busy and keep my patreon up and active. 

For today I wanted to show a bit of behind the scenes for those of you who are interested in knowing what goes to making these renders.

First off, the fun part is making the character. Choosing the hair and outfit and doing the posing. The image below skipped a ton of steps but the gist of it is, I had to model out the body proportions and the face. The pain in the butt was the dress, that dress wasn't made for that model so I had to fit it to her the best I could without much error. I do this a lot, and with pretty much every model because of how I shape the bodies.
Also look to the left side of the image, see those thumbnails? Those are test renders, and there's a lot more than whats shown here. I have to render to test the material, the lighting, and so much more. If it doesn't look right, I have to test again. I'm sure for other tg artists this is the same. 

After I'm finally done testing it's time for the final render and since its in 4k, it can take a while. I usually have a background set up on the stage but this time I only have the character which speeds up the rendering.
As you can see in the left image there are tons of errors. Like I said the dress wasn't made for the model so there are lots of holes that need fixing. I also wasn't happy with the face. I wanted her face to be a bit chubby to match the thicker body.

After the fixes are done, I went ahead and rendered the background which was simple since I was going to blur it anyway and didn't need to be such high quality.
After applying the background to the way I wanted, it was time for color correction. There are many ways to do this and depending on the situation it needs different solutions. Here you can see a few different versions. Most important thing for me is to make colors pop while retaining a good mix of light and shadow. This process takes a lot of testing to see if it matches the situation and comes down to personal preference. 

Once we're happy with out colors we can move on to effects. We can add a gradient for a good lighting effect, and the magic bloom to tell the story of the transformation. On the left image you can also see spots where I wanted more shadow. I wanted to emphasize the cleavage so I went ahead and darkened it to make it pop more. I did the same with the legs so I gave it more shade under the skirt. 

When we're finally done with all that, all that's left is to export the image and add the captions. And the final product you've already seen. 

I hope you all enjoyed this little behind the scenes.