Face Improvements & Quality - Devlog (Patreon)

Heya lewdypops. 

I haven't made a public post in a while, since most of the posts contain naughty boobs, and they're illegal as you all know! So I thought I'd make a Devlog post talking about some improvements I made (and will continue to make) to the base mesh, the quality I'm aiming for with Naughty Sandbox, and how I'll be iterating these quality improvements.

I did some research - studying the cutest faces, real and 3D - on the internet, and I'm going to make the Naughty Sandbox grill much cuter armed with this knowledge. I struggle with faces and identifying attractiveness, especially after working and looking at the same face for a while. I did think the current base mesh face was quite nice but received some criticism, and also the poll I made 3 weeks ago was very enlightening.

211 of you voted on what you were waiting for before supporting this project, and 2nd place with 42 votes was Higher quality / more beautiful girls. 

It's unacceptable that 42 of you aren't giving me any money because I'm bad at making cute grills, so I used Face App to see if their deep learning cuteness algorithm could make her cuter, hoping it will give me some example of how I can make her more attractive.

In most cases it makes her too cute, and turns her into a lil girl -

But neotenous traits are very attractive to most people, so I took the results and made some mesh changes, using blendshapes / morphtargets / shapekeys to A/B the changes in Maya - https://twitter.com/NaughtySandbox/status/1196120568862576640 - to see if I could make some compromise blend between her current face and a younger looking version with neonetous features like bigger eyes, less defined cheek and jawbones, fuller lips and rounder cheeks. 

I think the results are a big improvement so far, as shown in the header clip of this post, the improved basemesh is on the right, and the current basemesh is on the left. I'll be improving her further, and have already received some tips from various other artists on improvements I can make, which is awesome and helpful.

Face App is a cool reference tool for other things too, like make-up, smiles etc, and I'm going to be using it a bunch from now on I think. Some other cool results from it -

The basemesh improvement in the clip above won't be in the first build of Sandbox but I hope to add it in shortly after I have the playable demo out. Mesh changes to characters are fairly destructive depending on how dramatic the changes are, and right now my priority is on the first build. 

This is mostly because additional technical work has to be done on characters which are skinned to a skeleton allowing them to animate, and other facial elements like eyes, eyelashes, teeth etc may not fit in the right place any more after a mesh change to the head. So I'm going to make sure I update the base mesh once I'm more sure that my results are promising and a lot of people like how she looks. Improved base mesh will be in by the 2nd demo for sure, but I'd also like to release some "side builds" which basically function as a semi interactive model viewer. You'll be in an empty room with her and can have limited interaction. This might be a good way for me to let people check out new basemesh iterations and give their feedback separately from main builds.

Leads me to something else I want to address, about the quality of this project and its current state. I think the presentation and clips I've shown of Naughty Sandbox have caused it to gain way more support than I imagined this early on. Something which may be described as irony, is that because of all this support, I've been trying to rush a build out which won't necessarily have the quality or presentation I envision for Naughty Sandbox. I think this will only be temporary, and soon with more funds and time, I can "catch up" to my own expectations of the project, in terms of quality & features.

I am worried that the upcoming demo will leave people feeling unsatisfied compared to what they imagine, so I feel the need to tell people to please be patient while I work on improvements. Hopefully current supporters and supporters to come will have faith in my dream of reaching super high quality - and eventually not only the most realistic girls in the lewdy space, but also the most beautiful - and will forgive teething pains at the beginning of development.

Thanks for reading lewdy supporters & lewdy followers! A lil humble request to everyone following the project but waiting until further progress before supporting, if you'd like to help in other ways - please follow me on Twitter and help me out occasionally with likes & retweets! This is honestly not for my ego, it really helps push my Tweets into more people's feed who may be interested in the project.

https://twitter.com/NaughtySandbox

Thanks again cuties. Also @ Supporters - link your Discords with Patreon and get into the NS Disco!!