Okatsu WIP (Patreon)

The most challenging thing about Okatsu is to get her face looks right, after all that's her main appeal. In particular the eyebrows, why? Well, let me tell you some technicalities.

Many games, even from current generation, don't bother making eyebrows in their character model to be 3-dimensional and separated from the head. They just paint the brows straight to the face textures. When bringing this to HS we need to separate them so they can be colored independently from the face. Making new brow meshes out of the face is simple, but harder part is making new brows texture with transparency to retain the hair and  remove the skin around it. There could be better method out there, but mine is adjusting level until the hair is heavily contrasting the skin and making alpha channel from that.

But the fuzzier, blurrier, and more complex the brows are, it's harder to isolate the hair cleanly. My first attempt resulted in too little hair, the next has too many, and finally I have some good enough result. May tweak it again later, and overall face too. Still have to do the expressions, as always, the part when things slowing down. But overall this project is going along fine.