Rathian's Despair

[PlatyPete]

I spent some time getting the light rays working to really sell the mood of this scene.Thanks to 2Tie for all the extraction and import tools used to make renders like these happen (rendered in Blender 3.5 using Cycles.)

[Grender]

This is impressive! Please keep posting your renders!

P.S.: You should create a guide explaining how are you doing these.

[PlatyPete]

This is impressive! Please keep posting your renders!

P.S.: You should create a guide explaining how are you doing these. :P

Good idea! I can explain how I made this particular render. Notably, I used Cycles instead of Eevee, so some of these steps will be different for Eevee users:

1. I started by using 2Tie's tools to extract the monsters' and stage's textures and models, and import into Blender. I had to use Blender 2.79 to get the monsters with their armatures, because 2Tie's modified Frontier importer doesn't work with any newer Blender versions (this is just the state of the original Frontier plugin.)
2. Next, I used 2Tie's animation importer to apply the death animation to Rathalos, and the roaring animation to Rathian, dragging the keyframes around until I got the poses I wanted and deleting the rest of them. I had to check each animation in the monster's table file by hand to find the ones I wanted (I'm compiling a spreadsheet of this that I'll post once I've completed it.)
3. Once I'd gotten the animations imported, I moved over to Blender 3.5. I don't have a great justification for using a more recent version (it probably runs better and has more rendering options?), but I'm just more used to the interface and hotkeys.
4. The import and extraction tools will assign all the monster and stage materials the Principled BSDF shader, which has a lot of features I won't need: instead I used a Diffuse shader for any mesh that didn't need transparency, and mixed in a Transparent shader for any ones that did (set the Viewport Display -> Blend Setting to Alpha Clip so you can see the transparency in the Material view.) As a side note: I labelled all the materials and meshes while I edited their shaders for easy reference. They get imported as like "Mesh 0" or "FrontierMaterial.000" which aren't very descriptive. I also did some tweaks to the models that I might explain in a longer post or a video sometime.
5. The stage has a skybox which would be useful to replicate the in-game rendering, but will block direction lights and the World surface in Cycles. I hid the skybox and used a Sky Texture set to Nishita as the World surface (note that the sun disc is not available in Eevee.) I tweaked the settings and sun position to get the light coming in just right through the opening in the cave ceiling.
6. To get all that dust and those nice sun rays, I added a cube with a Principled Scatter shader, and scaled it up to cover the whole scene. Reduce density to taste.
7. Almost done, I set up the camera position, adjusted the focal length for the right sense of distance, and added some depth of field (which, in retrospect, didn't have all that much effect.)
8. Finally, I did some more tweaks to the Sky Texture, Film exposure, and the Rathian's pose; despite my best efforts, there were some bad, harsh shadows on part of the Rathian's jaw and a visible seam at her neck for some reason. I had to just turn her head until the lighting balanced out better. Merging vertices and recalculating normals didn't help, it's just a limitation of using such old models that were designed with a bright environment lighting and a single, dim directional light.

Feel free to ask me any questions, or clarifications on anything here!