Weekly Update - 7/6/24 (Patreon)

I meant to upload this yesterday, but I got distracted by redrawing a part of a page. This week we finished the basic lighting of chapter 4, and started blending. Sometimes I regret not sticking with Cel-shading, but I think the painterly style feels more sensual and that's more important. The feeling for the viewer.

And here begins the blending. This is the a stage I have to get right because the rest of the rendering kinda builds off of it. The less I screw up, the easier the rest of the render process is. And for reference, here's how many layers we're at right now.

this is what a final render looks like (and this isn't even including post processing)

So there's a lot more that will go in to making these look right, and I have to keep in mind what future layers are going to do. Like, I don't have to put so much detail in the shadows, because 2nd shadow will add depth and reflected light in those areas. It'll also increase the contrast. I haven't done ambient occlusion yet, which will also push depth and make things look better. So I have to keep all of that in mind as I work and those stages look better if I do. I'm going to have to adjust some of these, but they're pretty close to what I want.

So I've had a few people ask me about the eye, and I forget that we have no people. Basically this page is about Toph being able to "look" (move her eyes towards a direction) and she basically says, "I can't see but the muscles still work, if they didn't I'd be cross-eyed, my parents hired someone to teach me how to move my eyes in polite conversation - to hide that I was blind."  (that's not the exact dialogue). I added this page a long while ago because I was annoyed at people conflating moving your eyes with seeing, as if the muscles in the orbital socket and the optic nerve are the same thing. Some Blind people have eyes that wander, and the fact that Toph looks straight ahead most of the time means those muscles work.I've thought about removing this page a bunch, because I'm really tired of arguing with nerds on the internet about dumb shit that doesn't matter.

This is the one I redid, basically her lower torso looked wrong. It needed structure. Truthfully, I'm still not happy with it, but I think to make it better I'd have to redraw the entire thing, and I don't want to do that.

Here's the old version for reference

Anyway, thanks for your continued support, and I'll see you next week.