Cave Johnson Here!
 
Fact: The key to success is friendship, and as our data has shown, humans hate making friends.
 
The solution? Ponies!
 
Then, fire the guys who found those ponies and get some better ones. Then run those ponies through a series of contrived adventures, creating a foundation of love and admiration, built upon varying elements of harmony. Inspiring stuff.
 
And finally, we put that friendship to the test: ponies gave us 30 whole minutes of cooperation. Good job ponies!
 
Cave Johnson, we’re done here.
 
It may be true that a lot of people love ponies. It may also be true that everyone loves Portal. So I thought, why not combine the two together?
 
Originally I had intended to render a single anthro pony on one of the maps used in the game. Then I decided that since the theme of Portal 2 was co-op, I should put two ponies in the pic. I did port the maps to SFM and I tried to use them, but sadly the program crashed each time I tried to load a model into the map. So I settled for this mock test chamber I found on the workshop.
 
The ponies this time around are Rainbow Dash and the Twilight Princess. The reason I decided to go with these two is because an environment along the lines of the Aperture Science Enrichment Center would probably appeal to these two pones the most.
 
Not to mention this is my little nod to the TwiDash ship. I’ll admit I’m not the biggest fan of that ship, but it does entertain me. (I blame Ambris for this).
 
ANYWAY, onto the pic itself.
 
The body doubles for the girls are a bodygrouped version of Chell that was made by someone on digitalero (and who’s name I forget atm). The skinning was done same as prior body doubles: coat overlay over the grayscaled skin. I actually ran into a problem during skinning because while the model had two different skins; a shiny one and a not shiny one (Dashie has the shine), they shared the same hand texture. This of course presented a problem as it would be odd for Twilight’s body double to have cyan hands.
 
Eventually I came to a solution by decompiling the model, editing the skingroups, and recompiling it. The results were a success. It’s kind of a moot point now considering you can’t really see Twilight’s hands, but the upshot is that I now know how to add support for additional skins to a model. This is very useful as in the future I may be able to do these pics while using just 1 or 2 body doubles, not to mention I would be able to switch skins on the fly instead of cutting and pasting and deleting various texture files.
 
I decided the girls would just wear Chell’s tank and shorts from the game. I originally thought about putting Dash in a bikini top, but it just looked too out of place with the picture. The Portal Guns are the world models from the game, Dash’s gun is colored in ATLAS’ paint, and Twi’s is colored in PBody’s.
 
Posing was a little tricky, because this isn’t actually the Chell from the game I couldn’t use her animations. Thus the posing had to be done manually. Because I wanted each gal to have a different pose, I acted out different poses in meatspace and took notes of how everything lined up. (Having a 1:1 scale model of the Portal Gun helps out as well!)
 
I see Dash as being the more reactive of the pair. She prefers taking the most direct route to the exit. Thus she has a bit more of an aggressive pose. Her slightly bent stance, Portal Gun at the ready positioned, and a determined grin let you know that she’s ready to take on this puzzle headfirst.
 
Twilight is more about strategy. She prefers to get a good look at her surroundings before plotting a path to the exit. Her routes may not be as fast as Dash’s, but they are very efficient. Thus she has her Portal Gun held down at her side, adopting a more relaxed pose with her head turned to the left, as if she’s examining something off screen.
 
Because the map is just a simple room, there wasn’t a lot I could do to make it feel like a “real” test chamber, so I just put in some props from the game: a test chamber door, a turret, a companion cube, and of course Wheatley.
 
Initially I planned to have two Portals on the back wall. While the SFM technically can’t render Portals, there’s several addons that simulate the effect. One in particular uses a camera to project a simulated image onto a Portal surface. I was going to have two Portals that showed the backsides of the anthro models, perhaps hinting that maybe something else was on their minds other than testing. Unfortunately I couldn’t get it to work right, so I cut it. But I do plan to revisit it in the future as I love how the effect looks.
 
Lighting was pretty straightforward. The main light source is a volumetric light behind the door to create a more dramatic atmosphere. That also had the downside of making the pic look too dark, so another light was put in front of the girls to give them some proper highlighting. Finally, Wheatley’s eye has a small blue light to simulate his electronic iris.
 
Overall, for a pic that I pretty much conceived on the fly, I do like how this turned out. Now that I’ve gotten the hang of posing ponies and body doubles, as well as figured out how to compile models, I expect to have a lot more freedom with these pics in the future.
 
And of course, some appropriate music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5DgrFXPI2Y
 
Aperture Science would like to remind you this pic is not just a mere fantasy. An Earth exactly like Equestria as well as an Earth where anthropomorphic equines test Portal technology are guaranteed to exist.