Hi, Life continues to be a stress fest and as long as I continue to feel pushed, probed and otherwise messed with, I'll continue to seek relief through catharsis. In any event, this one is more "X-Files" than "Matrix." I tried to entertain some of the suggestions posted in the comments for "Specimen 13" - especially the private comment about the title font. Production Credits: DAZ Victoria 4 with elite morphs and morphs++. Texture is DAZ's "Elite Amy." Hair is "Boy Hair" from 3Dream. All organic surfaces feature pwSurface 2. Room was a series of planes, textured in photoshop. Floor area is from "Base Camp Tech Tiles" by the Ant Farm, available at DAZ, again retextured in photoshop. Big tentacles are from Stonemason and little tentacles are from RDNA. Robospiders from DAZ. Alien implants modeled in Modo. The sheet is DAZ's dynamic table cloth, textured (wait for it....) in Photoshop. Diffuse, specular and bump maps were created for the walls, floor and blanket using a hex pattern that I made in Filter Forge. You can see I really rocked the hexagon motif to make things seem strange and 'other.' Lighting: 1 Area light from above and a Uber Environment 2 light for bounce make up the first lighting pass. The volumetric pass was done with a uberSpot with a hexagon pattern gel and a uberVolume light cone. I also rendered out the little ambient glows for the Robospider eyes and such separately. Dynamic Cloth: I ended up learning some new tricks with DS dynamic cloth on this one. To get the correct 'feel' for the cloth I used the 'Ripstop Nylon' cloth preset that came with the Dynamic package. Don't neglect these presets - they can save you a lot of fiddling to get the proper behavior out of a panel. I had to animate the drape and move the character's right arm down on top of the blanket. It took several tries to get this the way I wanted it. Then I switched to single frame mode and ran a bunch of little drapes with "iterations" set at 1. Just keep running these until the cloth intersections hit just right. Once I hit the perfect drape I had to save and come back. The scene loaded but had lost all of my tweaks after the animated drape! Very frustrating. Also frustrating is a bug in the Dynamic cloth control that basically hoses a re-drape on the cloth after a save and reload. Grrr. So I did the whole thing again from scratch. This time, once I had the drape perfect I went to the Dynamics tab and hit "freeze simulation." This turns the dynamic clothing piece into a static object - which is great so long as you know you're not going to be doing any further reposing. But if a screw up means reloading and re-draping from scratch anyways it's win/win. I also subD-ed the cloth object to smooth it out more, which you cannot do with an 'unfrozen' dynamic piece. Rigging and scene overhead: As you can see there are a LOT of tentacles in the scene. The robospiders each have four, there are 4 on the girl, plus the two big ones - all with lots of skeleton items and easy pose etc. When you get that many figures into a scene, even a DS3A scene, things start to bog down. The scene takes a while to load, the controls become unresponsive as the little memory leaks start to pile up... you risk a crash and loss of unsaved work. To get around this I exported the robo spiders and big tentacles as two separate objects and re imported them, then reapplied the materials, deleted the rigged models and saved the scene under another name in case I needed to go back. Big improvement. Rendering: The Area and Environment light passes took around 8 hours to render, the volumetric was a 13 hour affair. 20 mins for the ambient. Compositing and post: I added the layers together in screen mode in photoshop, blurred the ambient and added that for some glow. Levels and Hue adjustments until I liked the look. Titles and background were a bit complicated and I'm out of space.