Reimagined Cerberus
In Greek mythology, Cerberus is a three-headed hound guarding the gates of Hades, stopping the dead from escaping and the living from entering. Each head represents the past, present, and future, forming a symbol of time-bound death.
In 1990s Singapore, a lesser-known rumour told of a three-headed dog lurking inside one of Sungei Pandan Kechil’s culverts1. Years later, I investigated the tale and documented it in a 31 March 2013 article titled The Hellhound of Sungei Pandan Kechil.
The creature, of course, never existed. It was a scare tactic by drug users to keep kids away from their hideout, a fabricated tale echoing the “troll under the bridge” motif with a darker, more grounded twist.
The article remained untouched until 23 November 2023, when I made some English grammatical fixes2 and crafted a post image using my 1998 abstract sketch of Cerberus as inspiration.
Many images generated by DALL·E 3 were bad. This one in particular sort of matched my idea, but even after post-production, it still lacked the original sketch’s intensity and spirit. My options at that time were only DALL·E 3 or Midjourney, while Stable Diffusion remained a no-go. Things changed when Sora came about.
Making Cerberus
I uploaded my sketch into Sora and received a decent output with a simple prompt.
Visualise attachment as a hyper-realistic Cerberus.
However, I wasn’t satisfied. While Cerberus is a mythical hellhound often portrayed as a giant canine with three heads, the creature in my sketch was actually inspired by a werewolf character I used to play in the arcade.
So, I fed Sora with reference images of Gallon from Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors, together with a modified preset that I crafted in a seperate post. Interestingly, I got a good output with just one try3.
Visualise as vicious, ferocious, angry, and deadly-looking three-headed Cerberus by using the First Attachment as left head, the Second Attachment as front-facing centre head, then Third Attachment as right head.
Detailed figure with sharp, bristling fur made of ultra-fine mix of black, grey, and white matte strands, individually clumping together under intricately detailed natural lighting and dramatic shadows.
Orange plasma tendrils and ethereal energy veins burst out of glowing Cerberus’s eyes. Cerberus’s mouths have magma flowing out, dripping like saliva. The rest of Cerberus’s body, from the neck down, is hidden behind violent volumetric black smoke and white fog, with right foot step forward.
A cinematic wide-angle shot, viewed from a distance, with Cerberus at far background. The rest of the frame is an evenly lit scene with white gridlines on light blue surface. Volumetric black smoke and white fog, flowing and spiralling thoughout all direction, mostly covered the ground.
Lighting on the Cerberus MUST respond to the environment. Use the background’s visible light sources to determine the Cerberus’s illumination, including direction, colour, intensity, shadow falloff, bounce light, and reflections. Cerberus lighting must stay consistent with the background context regardless of pose, position, or motion.
Final image MUST be ultra hyper-realistic photograph with maximum detail, taken with EOS camera. No soft rendering. No concept art. Only real texture, real physics, real light.
Cerberus is sometimes output as Gallon’s original color, and other times as monochrome. I think it’s because of the “matte” in the Fur description (paragraph 2), where the actual color is not defined. Either way, I want Cerberus to be grayish, so I updated the blue texts with additional cosmetic changes.
The background only serves as a placeholder. Anyway, here’s the result.
Making the scene
The final piece of the puzzle was easy to do. First, I uploaded the 2023 DALL·E 3 output with a straightforward prompt to remove unwanted elements, then uploaded the scene image as the Fourth Attachment, replaced the background with the proper description, and let Sora do the rest.
Visualise as a photo, remove dog and smoke.
A cinematic wide-angle shot, viewed from a distance, with Cerberus at far background. The rest of the frame is an evenly lit scene (Fourth Attachment) with brightly glow lightings illuminating the entire scene. Volumetric black smoke and white fog, flowing and spiralling thoughout all direction, mostly covered the ground.
The sky is packed with dense, churning storm clouds in dark blue and grey layers, stacked high with a heavy, oppressive atmosphere. Bright, jagged bolts of lightning tear down from the centre of the cloud mass, lighting up the sky in violent white flashes. Thunder rumbles visibly in the form of shockwave pulses through the clouds, while faint rain slants across the scene under the storm’s weight.
Gallon, Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors
The Fur description mentioned earlier was created on 12 May 2025, shortly before I wrote Crafting Maya on Sora. It was part of an experiment I did for Gallon, using different setups, resulting in some of the variants shown below.
- Despite the canal having undergone expansion work, the culvert in question is still accessible to urban explorers such as myself. ↩︎
- The 2023 revision is only accessible to members of Urban Explorers of Singapore and those within my personal network. ↩︎
- Similar to the dragons found in this link and this link, I prefer interpreting fanged creatures as ferocious, but I do turn them cute and cuddly when required, just not always. ↩︎
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