Behind the Scenes #2: Creating a CG (Patreon)

Update December 2025: A newer version of the posing portion of this post can be found in Behind the Scenes #8: Posing.

The Behind the Scenes series continues! This month we're discussing making a CG beginning to end.

The Behind the Scenes series continues! These lengthy monthly posts are for other creators to learn how I make Freshmen—and for those of you curious about what all goes into a game like this. Last month I walked through creating a character model using Daz 3D, and with that step done, we can move on to creating a full CG.

This post will be a broad overview to avoid being absurdly long, but I may dig deeper into each step in later posts, especially if there's interest in a specific topic.

With that said, let's walk through a CG from the Club Update beginning to end. This is a scene where Connor walks in on a surprising situation. If you're a Freshman patron who hasn't played the new update yet, fair warning that this is a spoiler!

Setting the Scene

Before you can do anything you need a set / environment in which to place your characters. Daz 3D sells a lot of environments, and even older ones can work just fine if you apply new shaders to the objects in the scene—shaders being textures and other surface settings that inform how an object looks and reflects light.

For many of the game's sets, I use purchased sets as-is or with some minor adjustments. For instance, the dorm room set is Boys Dorm Room by Tesla3dCorp. If you compare the screenshots to what the room looks like in the game, you'll notice I made changes like retexturing the floor, desks, cabinets, and end tables. I also replaced the beds with beds from Ultimate dForce Bed 2 by KindredArts & RavenLoor since they come with a very handy feature—a way to simulate the draping of the duvet so you can drop it on someone and it looks natural. The pillows also have morphs that can be used to create natural-looking head indents.

A set like this is similar to how I described Julian in the first Behind the Scenes post—an asset that's mostly good as-is, so I only needed to make a few changes before calling it done.

On the flip side, when I can't purchase—or can't afford to purchase—an environment that meets my needs, I go the kitbash route and build a room from the ground up. A good example of this is the Atelier 54 storage room set that is featured in a few interesting scenarios in the Club Update.

The base of the set was Tesla Private Resort—more specifically, just the walls, since it had the concrete look I wanted. I deleted everything from this set except the outer walls, then duplicated the wall piece and flipped the duplicate 180 degrees to form the shape of the room.

From there I filled the space with a variation of the floors, wall cables, and fluorescent overhead lights from the A54 bathroom set; ladders, tables, and shelves from other sets; an exit and exit sign from a restaurant set; and then finished up by taking pieces from the club to clutter up all the shelves and add stacked furniture. I made a window using a flat plane primitive—primitives being simple 3D objects like cubes and spheres you can create within Daz. I applied a whitewashed window shader, then placed a bright red light behind it to break up how white the entire room was looking, with the implication being that the side of the room is facing an alley.

Once all of this was done, the set was saved on its own instead of jumping straight to making a CG. That way I can do whatever I want with the set when making a scene without worrying about losing any of my hard work.

All of this was hand-placed, including every instance of clutter, stacked chairs, etc. It took a long time, but I think it was worth the effort. Starting out, I'd recommend just using environments as they come. This type of meticulousness isn't necessary if there's something already pre-built that meets your needs!

Bringing in the Cast

I treat making a CG like a director might film a TV or movie scene. The actors in this instance are the pre-made character models that have been saved as scene subsets that can be merged into the file with the set. The actors for this scene are Connor, Alex, Mafia, and NC17.

...who are all naked except Connor. I save character models as a few different scene subsets. One is the naked version, and the other versions wear clothes. If the character is going to be fully clothed in the scene, I merge that subset in—it already has all the body hair and dick removed to save me time. The naked guys will soon have some clothes on, but I need them to have their body hair and dicks present for what's to come, so I started with the naked models.

Something to be cognizant of while you work is how heavy a scene is—that is, how many textures, high-res models, and highly detailed objects are in the scene. Optimization will come later, but depending on the power of your GPU and PC in general, you may need to hide parts of characters—or entire characters—to be able to pose things without lag.

I go into each CG more or less knowing what I want it to look like, but I don't place the camera yet. Instead I pose each character, put them in position where I think I want them, place the camera, and then adjust the figures, camera, and lighting from there.

Posing Characters

There are a couple ways to pose characters. The easiest way is to use premade pose packs that let you click on a figure and apply a pose someone else created. The other way is to pose everything yourself using tools built into Daz.

Starting out, many people use pose packs because manually posing characters is very tricky. I did so as well. Nowadays I do a mixture of the two, using pose presets if I have one that more or less looks how I want, and manually making a pose if there isn't. Regardless, all the fine details will need to be made by hand—poses are built off the base Genesis model and will pretty much never fit a character model exactly, especially when body parts are interacting with objects or other people.

First up, Alex's hair had to be turned off since it's a heavy asset that slows everything down, and Connor was hidden since I don't need him yet. Then I put clothes on the boys, but removed Alex's dick and pubes since they would otherwise stick through his pants. Mafia's pants are a third party asset already in a pulled down state; for NC17, his pants have a morph I'll use to pull down the front once posed.

Next, I looked through standing and kneeling poses until I found three that looked close to what I wanted. I then individually applied those poses to Mafia, NC17, and bald Alex before positioning them together.

If you're familiar with the version of this CG in the game, you can tell right away that while the positions themselves are similar, I changed a lot from the pose presets. First, of course, is adjusting the Y position of each figure so they're not clipping through the floor. Alex's body from the lower abdomen up was reverted to its default state, and I used the built in Daz pose tools to rotate his waist, position his arms, and apply a yawning expression that's a quick and easy way to get someone to open wide for a dick. NC17's left arm position was changed, and I removed all pose adjustments from the neck up so I could get NC17 looking at Alex and Mafia looking at NC17. Both guys were also given premade expression poses.

A great tool to get guys looking where I want is Look At Me II Pose Control by RiverSoft Art. I used to either pose manually or use a "point to" feature in Daz, neither of which worked well. This tool makes it super easy to do things like have guys looking each other in the eye, and now I can't live without it.

I also use specific hand poses from FeralFey's Get a Grip Poses for Genesis 8—they're called pole grips, and well, that's what it does. There are presets for various size "poles", so I find once close to what I need and then zoom in close to adjust each finger bone manually so nothing is clipping through the dick or not touching the dick at all.

A big note for poses and CGs as a whole: if you're not going to see it, don't waste time on it. For instance, I might pose a leg so it's in a natural position, but if you won't see the foot, I don't spend time getting it to sit on the floor. I let it clip right on through. What the player doesn't know won't hurt them!

These rowdy boys are done, so now it's Connor's turn. I already know he's going to be blurry in the foreground, so I won't bother to give him an expression or even pose him below the waist.

For his top half, all I had to do was bend his waist and neck to the left, then position his left arm and hand. His right arm is in its default pose since it'll ultimately be entirely off screen.

Framing the Scene

The camera in Daz is mimicking real camera settings, so if you're someone with a photography background, you've got a leg up. For a novice like me, I read what I could, watched YouTube tutorials, and then figured it out as I went!

A basic way to frame a scene is the rule of thirds—that is, dividing what the lens can see into three rows and three columns, then positioning the camera and characters so that key parts of the image are near where the lines cross. Daz has a handy feature that'll put a rule of thirds grid up for you.

I also changed the viewport area to 16:9 / 1920 x 1080 since that'll be the final image output. Then I looked around the scene until I found a position that looked right before loading a camera into that position. For the camera lens, I typically start with setting it to 85mm, though it varies depending on the scene. From here, it was a matter of adjusting the camera position and character models so that Connor takes up the right side of the frame and the guys hooking up take the remaining 2/3rds, with an aim to draw attention to Alex's dick sucking efforts.

Now is also a good time to add some depth of field. Depth of field keeps a certain area of the scene in focus while the background and/or foreground are out of focus and blurry. The goal is to keep your eye on the most important part of the scene, which in this case is NC17 and Mafia getting serviced. I usually look down from above to set the focal distance, and then expand it from the default F/Stop of 22 to what looks good via the render preview. In this case the F/Stop is 25.

In this image, the line cutting just in front of Mafia's face is part of a rectangle representing the area the camera is seeing. The two lines on either side of that center line show the area that's designated to be in focus.

You may have noticed that pieces of the set are now missing. One of the walls was removed so the camera could even get this view, for one. All the other props were removed to optimize the scene.

Optimization

I mentioned optimization above, but basically it's minimizing just how much your computer needs to load to render the scene. If the scene exceeds your graphic card's VRAM (memory), it won't be able to render. For those of you with powerful graphics cards, this may prove no issue. But although I have a pretty good GPU, when I have this many characters on screen, I either need to render in pieces and composite them together or do what I can to lessen how much VRAM the scene utilizes.

There are a couple of great tools to simplify this. The first is Camera View Optimizer. This utility lets you select a camera and then hide everything not visible to that camera. That's why I wait until this point to start optimizing—the camera has to be positioned first. This tool can be finicky and doesn't always hide everything or hides things it shouldn't, but for the most part it works as intended. After the tool hides everything, I often fully delete the hidden objects to avoid having to load them in the first place.

The second utility is Scene Optimizer. This tool provides a list of every single item in the scene—which is why I delete the ones that were hidden—and the resolution of their textures. You can very easily select items like the walls, which are out of focus, and change the textures from 4k to 1k, which is a huge memory saver. You can also change the resolution of the individual character models. Blurry Connor doesn't need all his HD details viewable, nor do his clothes textures need to be high-res—and even the guys in focus can have some details knocked down since they're far enough away from the camera that you won't see those details anyway.

Optimization can be a little tedious, but doing it means I can do one single render instead of multiple renders that need to be composited together. The images also render faster. This step is well worth it for the time it ultimately saves.

Lighting

So now we've set up our scene—and we need to be able to see it! Since we won't see any of the fluorescent lights on screen, I removed those entirely so I can better control the lighting. Right now this is what everything looks like:

Which looks kind of cool with the red light coming through the window and the light from Alex's shoes. But ultimately we want to see the action!

There are two primary ways I light scenes. The first are HDRIs—basically big domes surrounding the scene that have a projection of a real life or rendered image with its light sources simulating natural lighting. I use these primarily when I want the scene to be lit as if sunlight is coming in through a window or the scene is outside. The revised images I shared of Connor use an HDRI made from a photo of an actual sunset:

You can buy HDRIs, but a great source for free HDRIs is Poly Haven, which is where I got this HDRI from.

More often I use emissive primitives—that is, a basic geometric object that has been turned into a light source. I almost always use a flat plane.

Emissive primitives are what I used to light the entirety of this scene. Discussing how to set up lighting would be a post all on its own, but I basically looked into photography lighting and film cinematography to get an idea of the various ways to best light a scene. For this scene, I wanted to simulate the fluorescents that would be above, using that as a way to give rim lighting to the central boys. I cranked up the brightness of the red light outside of the window, and then I arranged lights up above the set angled down to light up the other areas of the room. Lastly I have some lights angled onto the guys from either side so you can actually see what's going on.

For this scene I used entirely neutral lighting as opposed to warm or cool lighting since I was aiming to mimic the lighting the fluorescents used. I also adjusted the brightness of each emissive primitive/light so that the brightest light is aimed at what we want to focus on with dimmer light filling in the background and then even dimmer light in Connor's shadowy corner. This is an overhead view of the lighting setup for this scene:

The top two lights are up above the set and angled down facing the guys in the center. The red right light is straight up and down, and then angled to aim through the window and add some highlights to Mafia in particular. The light in the center is directly above the three guys, again to simulate the fluorescents that are ostensibly offscreen. The lower two lights are at the same level as the guys and angled such that they highlight their faces and dicks.

Lighting can take quite a bit of time to set up as I'm usually adjusting positions of each light and their brightness until I get something I think looks good. Generally I start with three-point lighting and work from there. I don't necessarily follow reality—a scene lit entirely by those overhead fluorescent lights wouldn't look good, for example. I don't mind a little stylization in my images.

Last Looks

All throughout the creation of this scene I've been viewing render previews that let me see how everything will look in the final image. The texture-only view is useful to pose and arrange everything, but only the render preview can show details like depth of field and lighting.

Before I moved on to the next step, I loaded up this preview and then studied each element of the scene looking for anything that's off: skin poking through clothing, fingers sticking into walls, hands hovering over an object instead of touching, and various other elements not matching other images in the game. For instance, Alex tends to give me trouble since his ear bars like to disappear for no discernable reason. It's not the end of the world if I miss something here—I can spot render just a portion of an image to fix a mistake—but I'd rather save time by avoiding that.

Rendering

Hey, we've got ourselves a scene! Now it's time to render. There are a whole lot of specifics to this that I'm definitely not an expert on. I use a variation of settings within Daz that were shared with me by the creator of Bound By Night:

Denoising

This is a step I only added recently. Once an image is rendered, I run it through an AI denoiser that removes all the grain  (the "noise") from an image. It sometimes smooths out fine details, but I don't mind too much. The difference is subtle but I think impactful.

I followed guides in this thread on the Daz 3D forums and use the Intel denoiser.

At long last, here is the final render after denoising:

But we're not done yet!

Post-Processing

I never take a render and put it into the game without editing. I do edits using GIMP, which is basically a free version of Photoshop.

As noted above, sometimes I need to composite together multiple renders of the same scene, either because I couldn't render every part of it at once or I had to spot render a fix. This image shows three renders that were composited together to make one CG in the Club Update:

And here's an example of some ugliness I needed to fix. In this case, Connor's hair asset was making strange black markings on his face, so I did a spot render of a bald Connor to edit in the unblemished skin:

Regardless of how clean the renders are, all images also go through some color adjustments. There's a fantastic plug-in for GIMP called G'MIC that includes a ton of color presets made by people with more expertise than me when it comes to adjusting sharpness, saturation, etc. I use these presets to give images a more polished look.

I've switched between two different presets when making this game, though for all the new renders I'm combining them together. One preset saturates the colors and brings out the blues, but that preset can makes skin very orange or somewhat pallid, depending the guy. So I separate out the characters and apply a different preset that has a more bronze-y look, then composite the two together. The aesthetic I want for the game is something vibrant but not so much that it makes the guys look odd. I think this setup is working well as a set style for the CGs to make them all feel cohesive. Here is the image with the two presets applied, and then the final composite.

And that's it—we're done!

Beginning to end, this is a lot of work. But using shortcuts like pre-made poses, tried-and-true framing and lighting rules, and color presets helps a lot. Outside of making a set for the first time, most of my time is usually spent on getting finicky with each detail, up to doing things like posing each bone in a character's fingers one by one. But with two years of practice, even that's going much quicker than it used to.

I hope this has been illuminating! If you're interested in my expanding on any part of this process, let me know below. And of course I'm always happy to answer questions!