The story continues from my previous render.... We landed near the hidden lab. Faemike55's Fae Valley also had sent out an offer to help if Miho needed it. The hyper plane was completely invisible to the hidden lab even though they had the most sophisticated high tech detection equipment for that purpose. Their basic problem was Miho's technology was far far ahead of theirs. Miho kept her technology private. She never told anyone about them and she created them herself. And only I knew about it and the creature had somewhat of a rudimentary understanding that about it in the sense that we could hide from others. He did not know how, just knew that Miho knew how to and to him it was basically magic and spells. To her these, though necessary technologies for her to deal with such evil corporations, were extremely dangerous technologies to fall into any corporation's or nation's or persons hand. That is why she never mentioned the capabilities she had created to anyone. The corporation had many air exhaust and intake systems around their underground hidden lab and though it was disguised and also was protected with laser motion detection, pressure pad, heat sensors and even live feed cameras, Miho was able to bypass all that within seconds without triggering any system and we then slid in through the air intake. The wolf had been told he needed to sit this one out and though it was not happy that he could not protect Miho when she was in danger, he obeyed Miho without question. Till now it was an easy entry into the underground lab. Miho had provided me and the creature with devices that pin pointed all movements while making us invisible to all the cameras and motion / pressure / heat sensors all around the place. So we were able to penetrate deep into the lab without being detected thus far. We decided to split up and while she went looking for the actual part were they conducted the horrible experiments, me and the creature went looking for their server room. We were going to copy every single piece of data on their computers and servers and analyze that later to permanently try and shutdown this evil corporation. Miho had found inner lab. There was no one around at the moment. Probably they were in some meeting. What she found in that part of the lab was absolutely horrifying to her. There were creatures and also humans horribly dis-formed into monsters inside containers with cables and pipes running into them all with the sole aim of making them into killing machines. She could see all were in extreme pain. It was far worse than she had imagined. Her blood started to boil again and there was a white hot anger starting to burn in her chest. She then realized that a person was coming into the lab, she kneeled down on one leg and lightly rested the non-lethal weapon on her thigh. She would knockout the person with her weapon if she needed to. Miho had made the weapon look like a conventional weapon because when someone saw a conventional weapon they were used to seeing they understood the threat. It would knock anyone out but would not kill them. The guy had been whistling and looked happy as though he was working in some harmless job and not torturing these poor souls. Suddenly the guy noticed Miho. His shock was complete. He dropped the stuff he was carrying. Never in a million years he thought anyone could have entered this underground lab without setting up all the alarms and been killed at the entrance itself if not with the first 10 meters of passing through the entrance. Their security was supposed to be that tight. He could not understand how this girl was there kneeling in the middle of the floor of the lab. She seem to have materialized out of thin air. His eyes darted back and front between Miho's eyes and the weapon she had on her. He felt very afraid and instinctively dived behind a chair and table to hide even though it was completely silly thing to do because it was a normal open 4 legged chair and table with nothing blocking the view underneath. Miho could not hold back a smile at the silliness but she understood the self perverseness instinct that had triggered it. She did not show anger in her face at this creep of a person. She just signaled with her finger for him to come over to her and started to point the weapon towards him.... He understood he had no choice but to follow her non spoken command.... He slowly stumbled on all fours towards her..... The story will continue with the next render....

This was a rather challenging render to do. As you would have noticed in my gallery I always do bright and sunny renders. Only on rare occasions have I rendered something in low light. Plus this scene had so much glass and reflective surface that putting a light anywhere was a serious problem as it would reflect brightly off the shiny surfaces and glass and create a big white highlight on multiple surfaces that would block the view behind the highlight. After posing Miho on an empty scene with the shiny floor, I added the first container. Did an initial render to see how the default material looked. The exterior body looked nice but the glass and the liquid looked bad. For glass / water / liquid I always use specular material. After setting the light emitters to the lights on the container and setting the Octane specular materials, the next test render looked much better. I got a nice glow from inside the container. But then I noticed the marking on the glass panel was gone because I had used the specular material on it. There is no diffuse pin on a specular node to set a texture map. It's mainly used for transparent surface.I now somehow not only needed the markings to appear but I wanted them to emit light as though the glass surface was actually some sort of a digital transparent monitor panel. I looked at the original IRAY material and saw the diffuse map had the markings but there was no transparency map to just extract the marking out. So to do what you see in the render I added a diffuse node and used a color correction node to adjust the gamma, saturation and contrast sliders to create a sort of transparency map from the diffuse map and plugged it into the Diffuse node's opacity pin. Then I plugged in a light emitter to the emitter pin on the Diffuse node. This gave me the glowing markings I was looking for. Then I mixed this Diffuse node with the glass surface specular node to get the nice effect that you see on the containers. I had done a fair bit of experimental renders with different color lights to see what looked the best in the containers. And the above combination looked the best. Gave it a really nice Sci-fi look. After that I created 4 more instances of the containers and posed them. Then I added a creature to each one and posed them individually as though they were in pain. Probably in the next render I will do a closeup. After finishing with lighting and posing the containers, I added the orange / red light to the lab walls. then did a test render. It looked really nice but there was simply too much noise. Light coming from behind specular materials cause extreme noise in Octane. Had to change the GL clamp settings in the Octane render settings to around 100 to get rid of the extreme noise. But one thing I seriously dislike about doing that is that it kills the suppleness of the skin and hence Miho's skin looks a bit flat. After taking care of the extreme noise, the next issue was the light on the scene was very low even though there were so many lights on the scene. So had to do something about it. I added a gray HDRI to the environment but it put too much light of the scene through the open front of the lab and all the shiny surfaces turned white. So I enclosed the scene and put panels all around the scenes to block the HDRI light from areas I did not want it to light. Finally ended up with a small opening behind the camera to get the lighting right. That is the light that you see reflecting on the container base and it is pretty harsh shine. Now that shine also was appearing on the glass surface which I did not like. So I had to put another plane and moved it up and down until I was able to block out the reflection just at the top edge of the container base. I had spend round about 5 hours just creating the scene and adjusting all the materials / emitters. And after 2 and a half hours of so called final render I canceled it as I really did not like how Miho's skin was looking under this lighting. Way too flat. I have put in so much effort over months to make her skin look good in daylight that it was hard to accept the flat skin I was seeing here. The same material did not work here properly. So I edit her skin a bit more to add a bit of shine to it and then restarted the render again. It was an 5 + hours render before it was done and Miho's skin looked much better. I will probably continue working on the skin material for low light situations for the future low light renders. But at least Miho looked so much better than my previous 'final' render. I also darkened the walls in the last render to give the scene a more dramatic and striking look. I think the overall scene looks great with all the reflection on the floor and the floor still showing its own pattern. It has the sci-fi feel to it. All materials except the container metal exterior has been modified / changed with custom materials. I also increased the overall exposure a bit in the Octane render setting to brighten up the render a bit while still keeping the overall scene dark. Btw. Many of you have complemented Miho on her new hair do. It is 'Shavonne Hair' available at Daz. Though I have bought many hairs over the years, only 2 or 3 suits Miho and this one is among those few.

eekdog had wanted to know where I got the alien pods / the sci-fi container you see in the render. It is called 'Sci-fi Lab' and available at Daz. Can't put the link here because of the stupid Renderosity TOS. Just search for it in the daz site.