Aurore - LeGuymelef's models have a lot of great built-in features like makeup, morphs, poses and skin details so they're great for customizing. I also added in Ecksoh's particle hair, which looks great, but needed a few tweaks to fit this particular model.This set is available on open3dlab, along with so many great other CP2077 options. I lit with a hot area light outside the window, and then shaped with mostly ghost point lights. I also started using shaders plus and made a caustics object to make pretty flourishes with. If you've ever seen Kyoko's renders, they do this to great effect.
Shadowheart - I've been doing the 'Alone at Last' series in Daz to make renders to promote DoForDaz's work. It's a great model and while working in Daz always presents challenges and has limitations compared to Blender, I can use diffeo to port back and forth to fix things like her dress, hair or whatever and then just render in Daz, which does take a little longer, sadly. Iray is super outdated. Pretty simple scene as you can see. Mostly lit with ghost lights
Mizora - Again, a fairly simple setup, but a challenging pose that PlayFair3D thought I'd have fun with. He was right! Mizora is so awful to Wyll, I enjoy the idea of him working out a lot of frustration towards her, which she actually doesn't mind in the slightest.
There's the giant gobo doing a lot of the heavy lifting in the scene to give it a mood.
Tifa - I wanted to try out Mustard's new model, but it only works in Blender 5.0 which I haven't fully made the jump to yet. But by that point, I just wanted to work with Tifa so I went back to his slightly older model. I changed up a lot in the hair and skin shaders, but she's another model with tons of great options so I got her looking how I wanted with only a little sculpting. I hated the original pose and the first lighting attempt was meh so I shared it with some friends and they, Batesz in particular, gave me great suggestions to salvage it. Now I think it's prolly my 2nd fave Tifa render. Shaders Plus came in handy in this scene too.
Karlach - Th3Celtic is kind enough to give me access to his amazing models so when he makes a new one, I pretty much drop everything to try it out. My favorite Shadowheart model uses his as its base. I've always wanted to do a render of Karlach really letting loose after finally getting her engine fixed and I'm happy I had this model to work do that with. rlg_3d released Karlach's camp just in time for me to start up on it as well. Serendipitous indeed. More Shaders Plus and additional vfx. I also simmed some mantaflow fire, which was new and surprisingly easy, if not super impressive. Tau is doing amazing fire work on their new Karlach model with fancy af Embergen. Looks amazing
Any questions, feel free to ask!