See my blog for a couple of alternate versions of this image (which are actually mistakes made in rendering before I got to this one). I'll also go into further detail on how I put this one together, for those interested (but in short, the 'spots' on the Creature's body were meant to emulate a 'Bio-luminescent' glow on the skin).
An image slightly inspired by the movie "The Shape of Water", which surprisingly (to me, anyway) won Oscars for both Best Picture and Best Director
I'll admit it, I've always had a soft spot in my heart for "Beauty and the Beast" style stories
I guess its because its easy for a nerd like myself to identify somewhat with the 'monster' in movies like these: Someone who feels misunderstood by the 'Pitchforks and Torches' mob, and may secretly be a bit of a romantic inside
Of course, this movie went a bit further than many "B & B" type stories, in actually saying (if not showing) that the Beauty actually had sex with her Monster Boyfriend
Matter of fact, I recently saw a couple of videos that go into a bit of detail behind the concept of "Beauty and the Beast" style stories.
One is by Lindsay Ellis called "My Monster Boyfriend": "My Monster Boyfriend"
Another is by a Youtuber (and friend of Lindsay) called 'Readus', who also talks about the subject and how it relates to being LGBT (and African-American, to a degree): "Fallin in Love With Monsters"
While I myself can't speak on the former, I can certainly speak on the latter, as being a Blerd when I was in my teens in High School was not particularly an easy thing, which is probably why I so enjoyed stories set in sci-fi and fantasy settings: Not only was it a respite from the problems of the real world, but I could identify sometimes with the Monster in the stories (not to get too maudlin
).Anyway, don't know if I'll actually depict the two characters in the 'act' as it were
This was an IRay render, and you know how it wrecks my system after each image (I love the super detail in IRay, just wish it were easier to use).
I'm surprised that the movie won Oscars for both Best Picture and Best Director. Rarely does a sci-fi/fantasy movie like this even get nominated, much less win (last I remember was Best Picture for "The Return of the Kind", but that was the Oscars admitting that they couldn't ignore how damn good every movie in the trilogy was).
I also bet that Universal Studios is kicking themselves so hard right now. Del Toro went to them initially with the concept of doing an 'official' Creature from the Black Lagoon film, using much of the same story he used for this. But they wanted no part of that, wanting to kick off their "Dark Universe" with "The Mummy" instead. If they had listened to him, they would have had a Oscar Winner to kick off their franchise (although, to be honest, not many people went to see it, although I have noticed that at my local theater the movie was gone, now its back with 3 showings per day ^_^)
For "Image Construction" details:
Awhile back Daz3D put a 'Creature from the Black Lagoon" morph for the Genesis 3 figure on sale. Since I usually focus on females in my image, I only picked up the one for the female model.
However, because I now have so much stuff for the G3F, I happen to have had a morph that turns the female character into a male, which comes in handy if there is a texture (and even morph) for the female you want to use as a male instead, and that's what I did with this image.
The first Alternate image was my attempt to do 'bio luminescent' spots using a shader that actually makes the spots glow, but the glow turned out too bright (as well as the entire image too grainy, as I put everything into the scene for this render).
For the second Alternate image I first rendered the background separately in Poser, leaving only the two figures for the Daz render. I tried lowering the intensity of the 'glow', but for some reason it only turned them red (got to look into how to modify the glow; it seemed to work in other images, like the 'Radiant Child's' hair from earlier).
I had also modified the 'Creature's' skin to put some blue stripes on the torso, legs, and head. However, maybe because it was an Iray skin, or maybe because of the 'wet' skin application, you can't see the stripes clearly enough.
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