Okay, so Velora.

Of course, the first step was sketching.
So, I did a rough sketch.


the next step for me was choosing a character and posing it. I chose Zsazsa since I already had her in my library. She's quite tall and looks great for this kind of fashion shoot. I wanted to make the shoes myself, but since they weren't the main focus and I wanted to finish this one quickly so I could focus on my other project I added SU Leather Shoes and the FE Punk Ponytail. The hair is for G9, but that's nothing I can't fix and with the addition of a hat, its barely visible anyway.

I couldn't find any pose close to what I had in mind, so I sent it to Blender using Daz Bridge and started working on materials and posing.

I usually use the same material setup for my Daz characters since my custom setup captures more detail and gives me more control.
Now that I had the materials set up and the pose keyframed, it was time to actually make the dress.

In Marvelous Designer, I created the patterns, baked the animation, and exported the last frame back into Blender.
I could've kept it in A-pose and parented it to the rig with weight painting, but that wasn't the focus and I wanted it to look more physically accurate.

Here's the pattern in Marvelous:


In Blender, I then used the edges of the same fabric to create the details.



Notice, for instance, the lace and the rings are made using the edges of the same fabric but you have to set it up properly in Marvelous so that you won't run into issues in Blender.
The hat is also very simple I made it in Blender before posing, so I could match them correctly.

I fixed a few other parts of the outfit, made some simple latex materials, and then it was time for rendering.



For the first renders, after setting up the lighting, I made a simple studio background and rendered two passes: one for the image, and another AOV for the background so I could use it as a mask in Photoshop.
These renders don't have any post-processing,  everything was done inside Blender in the rendering tab. I just boosted the exposure and set the contrast to Medium High.
The reason I used Photoshop was for the Velora text on top of the image. Also for the first renders, I wasn't sure how I wanted to design them, so I brought them into Photoshop to test out ideas without re-rendering each version. I tried out about 12 different designs and ended up choosing the ones I submitted.

The stage renders were much simpler. I did everything in Blender and just added the Velora text on top.

Now that I knew everything looked good, I downloaded the stage and started working on it.

The lighting and cameras are almost the same I just appended everything into the new project and made slight adjustments.
However, as unnecessary as it may sound, I did changed the crowd.

I tried to find as many unique crowd characters as I could,  found 19. Then I separated a copy of each one from the main crowd, fixed their rotation and origin point, and separated all the crowd characters from each other. Without changing anything, I just set their origin points to the center of their body and then to the ground.


Once everything was ready, I made a small, simple Geometry Nodes setup.
All it did was instance the characters back into their original positions but now I had control over their rotation.

At this point, I could have manually adjusted their rotation to face the camera (especially since I had three angles in total), but since the node tree was already open, I added a small extra feature: it would take the active camera and use its rotation to make sure the crowd always faced it.


Kind of unnecessary but I promise writing about it took longer than actually doing it, so... why not.

This was a little breakdown of making Velora.
I hope you liked the result.

Hopefully, I'll be able to finish my main project and show you that one too.

Thank you.

I made this other render as well, also realized my camera was a bit off and fixed it.



By the way, Let me know which render you like the most.

I loved this last render, your lighting and color choice is great.