Happy 9th anniversary to My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic! Today marks exactly nine years to the day that the series premiered on an awesome but long gone television channel formerly known as The Hub and the beginning of an era and the fandom. It’s hard for me to believe 2010 was nine years ago since it often feels like time flies by and it was only two years after that I saw the first episode of it myself. All the memories that were had, all the fan art and fan fics that were made, all the fan songs composed, all the fan conventions and meetups that were hosted, and all the episodes that aired, will perhaps be remembered for a very long time, long after the series officially ends and a new generation has itself ended. Heart

This artwork was, to my knowledge, one of the first things of the new series to be used as promotional art, used extensively from The Hub’s website to the toys that were made around that time. Thus, I’ve used this artwork as a base for my own because to me, it signifies the beginning of MLP:FiM, and I’ve done my best to recreate it using the SFM models available and rendered it on Blender 2.8’s Cycles engine. :) (Smile)

This artwork took 10 hours, 19 minutes, and 23 seconds to render fully at 700 samples using a combination of the GPU and CPU, with a total of 255,464 vertices, 461,264 triangles, and a total of 2,150,000 strands for the ponies’ manes and an additional 440,000 strands for the grass.

~ Credits ~

The pony base models used were created or modified by these DeviantArt users: kp-shadowsquirrel, poninnahka, juicedane, aeridiccore. Shader materials and hair particles were done by me afterwards for use in Blender’s Eevee and Cycles engines.

Spike’s 3d model was created by: beardeddoomguy.

All textures used in this artwork are from textures.com (formerly CGTextures), Poliigon, HDRI Haven, DeviantArt user “electedpony” and their pony bump maps pack, included with each pony model, or handmade by me using procedural textures.

All characters are created by Lauren Faust and owned by Hasbro Inc. for use in My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.