Dance of the Sugar Doll

I’m not really sure how this came about. It’s an idea I have had sketched out in my “notebook of ideas” for a few years now; so many years that I forgot what it was all about other than “Day of the Dead”. Still, it looked interesting so I decided to see if I could create it and create it I did. I kept tweaking every single material in the scene constantly until each were perfect while I tried figuring out what the hell I was doing and how to finish the artwork. (All I had sketched out in my notebook were the main figures and no background stuff, so I had to figure out the setting and such without any help from my past self.) I couldn’t find a “bone” shader for my skeleton figure so instead I tried a Cycles “skin” shader just to see how it looked and it looked awesome so that’s what I used here. Oh, and that’s my D9S Rosita character for La Femme, by the way. All in all, I think it turned out kinda cool and I’m glad I finally decided to try to finish and publish it.

I rendered this scene in Poser 12 with Superfly. As mentioned in my main notes, I went over every material in this scene and enhanced each material zone with new Cycles or PBR shaders as best I could. The hair model is utilizing my own texture/material setup. I couldn’t get the skirt from Rhiannon’s NyX Dreamer set to conform to that exaggerated pose using the handles provided. So, since the skirt was a solid and single group, I turned it into dynamic cloth and that’s how I got it to drape over the figure in the way that it does. (I learned a thing or two about the process of creating dynamic cloth while doing this; it was fun!) There were no effects brushes used on this scene, all the petals in the scene are 3D props. In postwork, I enhanced the contrast with an adjustment layer and an action in Photoshop then decided to take the image into Lightroom. In Lightroom I made the final adjustments and tweaks to the colors and contrast of the artwork. After a return into Photoshop, I added my logo.

Most of these items are available from the Renderosity Marketplace (unless otherwise noted):

• D9S Rosita for La Femme by Dream9Studios
• Sugar Skulls by MortemVetus
• NyX Dreamer by Rhiannon
• FMPs for La Femme by Blackhearted
• Mariana Hair by Afrodite-Ohki
• Natasha Collection by GrayCloudDesign
• Gigli Halloween – Bones by Sixus1
• Petal Dropper by ShaaraMuse3D
• Blossom Tree 4 (for cloud of petals prop) by Flink
• Rose-Z by Poisen