Behind the scenes at our virtual shoot for Playboy’s 2006 edition of the Women of Video Games

By Scott Alexander
When we began planning our third annual Women of Video Games feature, we knew only one thing about it: It had to be different. Two years ago, we had two individual images created by the game developers themselves, Bloodrayne from Bloodrayne 2 and Luba Licious from Leisure Suit Larry. For last year's outing, we upped the ante with eight removable trading cards, all done by the original game creators, including characters from Hellgate: London, Indigo Prophecy, Darkwatch and more. This year, however, we couldn't stand the thought of all these fine women hanging out by themselves. And you know how we solve problems around here: When in doubt, throw a party!

We had the world's premier party pad at our disposal, so the question wasn't so much "Where?" as it was "How?" As in, how do you take seven virtual women, each of whom has been created by a different game studio, put them in the same place, and have it look believable? This isn't a problem that comes up too often at magazines. But it's par for the course when you're designing a game. So we brought in Justin Chornenky as our visual coordinator.

As one of the artists who worked on the Playboy: The Mansion video game, Justin created a 3-D virtual environment based on a photograph of the Playboy Mansion at night. Within that environment, he created specific lighting sources so the designers could light their ladies consistently, giving the illusion they were standing in the same space. This is known as a "lighting stage." We then solicited sketches from the participating game studios of the women they wanted to feature, to make sure all the body positioning worked both aesthetically and functionally. We blocked the sketches into Justin's lighting stage, made some adjustments, and once we were satisfied with the broad strokes, sent each developer the lighting stage and told them where their character would be standing.

They then rendered their character in full 3-D using the common light sources, and submitted their final art to us. Of course, all these ladies standing near each other cast shadows, which Justin and his team adjusted once all the ladies were in position.

The final result can be seen in the November 2006 issue of Playboy magazine, in all its fold-out glory. We hope you enjoy it. In the end, we found out that every party is a lot of work, especially the ones that never happened.