I’ve had it in my head for weeks to create a super-epic battle scene full of Victorias. Something big. Something with a lot of blood and gore, and a little nudity.

I created the Gladiator scene as a proof of concept. So imagine this, but with another 30 Victorias. I might throw in the Horse 2 while I’m at it.



Just like the Gladiator scene, I started with the Aslan Court and Victoria.



I then added the Centurion Armor...



…followed by the Her Battle texture.



At first I though that it would just be one army of Centurions against the other...



…but then I found the Fantasy Fusion outfit. It’s perfect.



I though about how I was going to lay out the characters. Do I just throw a ton of Victorias in the arena and start posing them at random? Or do I pose duos individually?



Working with 30 Victorias at a clip is a pretty resource-intensive task. It made it pretty difficult to navigate around the scene. My Mac started to bog-down pretty quickly. I figured it would be much easier to pose them one-on-one, and merge them all in to the final scene after all the duos were complete.

For each duo, I started with one Centurion and one Fantasy Fusion character.



I gave them some angry/screaming/yelling faces...




…and posed them fighting/killing each other.





What’s a battlefield without a few dead bodies?



For beheadings and cut off limbs, I had to get a little creative.



You can’t delete body parts, so I basically have one Victoria on the floor with her head hidden and one standing with her body hidden. This is the same duo I used for the Gladiator render.



For cut off limbs, I did the same. I added 2 extra Victorias.



I then hid the arm on the main character and hid everything but an arm on the other. I then moved the hidden Victorias into position.



I created two Fantasy Fusion figures with spears in their hands.



I then added them to the file that I created when I first started playing around with the Horse 2 Starter Bundle. That’s going to look awesome in the final scene.



Duo after duo, I saved each one as a new file. Posing 30+ Victorias was a lot of work. All the details are there. Everything from hands gripping weapons to the expressions on their faces.

I also want to scatter some bones around the arena, so I created another file with the Aslan Court and scattered Them Bones all over the place.



I then stripped out the court and just saved the bones in their locations.



I then opened up my main Aslan scene and started to merge in each duo.



File after file, I merged each one with the main Aslan file until they were all loaded in.



Since each Fantasy Fusion character is paired with each Centurion, all I had to do was position the Centurions wherever I wanted them and the Fantasy Fusion characters would follow.



I then added my lights and merged in the bones.



Time for a render.

This scene is seriously intense! Half way through creating it, it became clear that 8 Gigs was simply not enough RAM. With all these assets loaded in, DAZ Studio became impossible to use. It would take a good 45 minutes just to open the file. The slightest movements would take minutes to update. I had a clear vision in my head of how I wanted this scene to look, and I did not want to compromise and have to start removing Victorias for the sake of RAM. I hopped on Amazon and ordered an 8 Gig RAM kit. It’s still a little sluggish with even 16 GB of RAM, but at least now it’s manageable.

Altogether, the file sucks up 14 GB of RAM and uses 800% CPU while it’s rendering. Insane! Have you ever seen a computer run at 800%?



During a full 6000x3375 render, all 8 cores run at full throttle!!



I don’t know how long it actually took to render. I gave up watching it after 10 hours and went to bed. It was only at 64%. It was finished when I woke up the next day. The log file reports “Total Rendering Time: 1 days -35.-1 seconds”. There must be a bug with the report when it passes midnight or something. It couldn’t have taken 24 hours; 18 max.

I know that if I had lowered my bucket size from 128 to 32 and increased my xy samples from 4 to 24 it would have gone a little faster, but that’s water under the bridge.

It looks amazing! I rendered it at 6000x3375. It’s absolutely massive! Shrinking it down to 620x348 just ruins it. I hope you can get a sense of the detail I put into it.



Just to give you an idea of just how big this image is…here it is stretched between my 27” and 30” monitors. It’s still wider than that!



There’s some crazy detail in this image.



I can’t believe I can take such a small portion of this image and blow it up on my 27” monitor and it’s like looking at a Blu Ray! I’m going to have to get poster prints made up of this when I’m done!



I started adding some blood and gore, but it’s going to take some time to complete the post work. I’m not sure if I’m happy with the way it’s turning out, but here’s a sneak peek:



It’s going to be EPIC!!!