​Screenshot via Dragk on Twitter
Screenshot via Dragk on Twitter
Tech

How Is There Already So Much ‘Elden Ring’ Porn? We Asked the People Who Made It

”If everything is working properly with the rigging, it is very satisfying! Though if it isn't working properly, well, that is hell."

Every time a new video game comes out, a community of 3D animators gets to work rendering high-quality, highly imaginative porn scenes with its characters. Final Fantasy VII Remake, Overwatch, Genshin Impact, Horizon Forbidden West—name a game and there’s probably some 3D animated porn of it on Pornhub or other tube sites, usually within days of the game’s release, or even prior to its release.

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Elden Ring, one of the biggest games to launch this year, about being a miserable wandering maidenless wretch of a Tarnished on a Lord of the Rings type mission, is no exception. The internet is already filled with high quality 3D Elden Ring porn. Who’s making it, and how are they doing it so fast?

Magmallow, an adult 3D content creator who made sex scenes with Elden Ring characters— a penetration POV scene with Ranni the witch, and one of Melina giving ye Tarnished a little rest at a site of grace, if you know what I mean (a blowjob)—told me that he’s not a mega-fan of the game, but they saw an opportunity in the characters. 

“I can't say that I like Elden Ring much, but it's worth noting that the visual design is pretty decent. Female characters really look individual and attractive (more cute than sexually attractive though),” he said. “And, frankly, ‘strike while the iron is hot.’ Especially when it comes to something extremely popular.” 

“A lot of people are playing Elden Ring, it's captured a lot of people that have been interested in the legacy of ‘souls-like’ games but have never had a great jumping-on point until now,” one adult content creator, who requested anonymity for professional reasons, told me. They called it a “numbers game,” where creators follow the demands of the fans. 

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Magmallow said that to make a 40-60 second video, it takes him about a week, working at a leisurely pace. He starts with a simple idea, such as a pose, situation, or other small detail, and then works up to character models and scenes. Then comes animation. “At this step, the original idea begins to acquire some spontaneous details,” he said. “However, it's always pretty chaotic. As an amateur, I lack discipline.”

Dragk, who makes art for his Patreon and on Twitter, described a similar process: Start with an idea for a pose or character, then get to work on 3D modeling, and his favorite part, animation. ”If everything is working properly with the rigging, it is very satisfying! Though if it isn't working properly, well, that is hell, making convincing movements and proper expressions is very very time-consuming,” he said. “Imagine having to fix hours upon hours of work because a bone isn't working properly and is messing with something else, or you overlooked something on the model itself and It just won't look good under any type of lighting, yikes haha.”

Lighting and rendering come next; rendering is the process of turning a 3D scene inside a program like Blender into a 2D clip you’d be able to see on Pornhub or Twitter. This can take a couple of hours up to a couple of days, depending on how complex the scene is (and whether one’s computer crashes while it’s working on this in the middle of the night, Dragk said). All together, a completed animation takes Dragk between 20 and 72 hours total, not counting the rendering time.

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All of this happens under a time crunch to get the content out while people are still interested in the game. Sometimes that means taking commissions, while others are just inspired by the love of the game or an audience’s interest in it. “Usually animations take a week or two of casual work, this Elden Ring one took three days of constant work as I wanted it to release whilst Elden Ring was still collectively relevant,” the anonymous creator told me.

A clip they made of Melina wasn’t a commission, but their Patreon subscribers are into it, so that’s what they make. “Since animations can take a decent chunk of free time and energy, I have to focus on content that my patrons also have a connection to, which is why I predominantly work on a single IP,” they said. “In this case my own interests in the ER universe simply aligned with the interests of my patrons.” They’re currently 100 hours in their second playthrough.

There was already something very horny going on with Elden Ring and its players before these 3D artists got to work; people are using haptics-controlled cockrings that vibrate with strikes, and shoving metal sticks up their urethras while playing; the game’s already an exercise in masochism, as getting curb stomped for hours by the same impossible boss is part of the experience people seem to enjoy the most. 

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A few characters stand out for adapting to NSFW art: the furries love Blaidd, a half-wolf NPC, and love drawing him with an enormous cock. Ranni the Witch is also super popular; she has four arms to get creative with. Melina, who appears early in the game, is another popular subject for porn. There’s no actual sex in this game, but there are a few cute cursed ladies and at least one ripped man-wolf, which is plenty for makers of 3D animated porn to work with.

“I think that it has been very popular, not only I've seen an influx of new content from a lot of very talented artists, the animation I did featuring Ranni the witch was on trending for a couple of days not long ago,” Dragk told me. “I think that the game is an absolute masterpiece, Hidetaka Miyazaki is a visionary. Everything about the game has been an experience, the art, the music, the level design, the open world, the characters and enemy design, the gameplay, everything!” 

Several of the artists I talked to brought up the popularity of Lady Dimitrescu erotica from Resident Evil Village in January as a comparison, much of which came out before the game was even released. But one could argue that Capcom knew exactly what it was doing when it created a giantess who physically and verbally dominates and steps on you; compare this to Elden Ring, where characters are more grotesque than horny, and fans are left to fill in the blanks with their own imaginations. Much like the gameplay, getting boned up for Elden Ring is a beautiful but open-ended mystery, made possible with collaboration.

Elden Ring has been out for a month now, and porn made of its characters wasn’t a pre-release hit for 3D erotica makers. Many of them waited until they could play the game and get a sense for its visual aesthetic and characters before getting to work on their own hornier interpretations. 

“It is always more comfortable to deal with what you are aware of,” Magmallow told me. “I started working on the first animation a few days after when the data miners found a way to extract character models from the game. Still I'm not a professional artist, so I need some models as basis.” People create models of characters and upload them to sites like SmutBase or on their own Patreon accounts, where makers can use them in design programs like Blender to customize and animate them into scenes.   

Like Lady Dimitrescu porn, interest in Elden Ring erotica will eventually wane; many players are on their third, fourth, fifth playthroughs of the game already, while others who bought it hoping for an introduction to FromSoftware’s vast worlds and were swiftly owned have put it down and moved on. Such is the cycle of being an adult content maker on an internet saturated with 3D rendered witch vaginas.