Experiments in PVC/Resin Model style rendering

Hello everyone, I wanted to share a curiosity of mine over the past couple of months. I've been really in love with the soft, glowing quality of PVC/Resin anime figurines. They always look so fantastic and aglow in photo documentation, and for several fanart pinups I feel as though I ended up referencing the quality of light on the model moreso than actual references from the games, animation stills, etc.

First I kinda did my hypothesis Adora model illustration with the layers above, and then I did a straightforward photo study of a model photo I liked...which turned out much warmer than the source, evidently there's some color difference between my monitors. 😔

I'll upload a timelapse of this photo study for gold patrons in a second!

I use a lot of rim-lighting in my work because I think it's a really useful way to carve a figure out from the background and give them an instant sort of roundness and dimension, which I'm hopelessly addicted to. I've also spent a bit of time in game development so I'm at least kinda familiar with the way  3D models are textured and what's created through shaders vs. painted or procedural texture maps. Anyways, I was ultra curious so I decided to spend some time trying to figure out why I like staring at these things all the time.

I think there's something to the quality of light that you get with something so small and perhaps light-transmissable as thin plastic, where the shadows never get too dark, the forms are often very soft, pillowy and simplified which means light always lands on them in a really gentle, lovely way. Most of the figures are painted with a matte clearcoat, except for a gloss over the eyes or other wet or shiny materials.

I also think there's something about the way they're lit in product photos that does a lot of the work of making them so beautiful, they have a sort of soft white glow that wraps around the edges of forms, and I'm convinced that high depth of field photography does something to our brains that we can't help but enjoy. Almost like there's something innately enjoyable about looking at something small and precious, and high depth of field photography imitates the way the lenses of our eyes create that sense of focus in real life.

This is a whole lot of speculation and doesn't mean a whole lot until I put it to use, so I am going to try to isolate some of the aesthetic ideas here and apply them in other situations to see how they come out, to see if there's something I can add to my work to give it this charming miniaturized feel I love so much.

The result might be some really weird stuff, but I hope it will at least be also sexy and that you'll enjoy coming along for the ride :) Thank you all for supporting my work and experiments!

<3

Winton