Poll7 Wip1 (Patreon)

- As you might've guessed, I started working on the poll hair these past few days. Things have been a bit rough and stressful for me the past week, so I only worked on this occasionally and sparsely. Started making textures first like the last time and this is the end result. Fortunately I think I've gotten much faster just off the second attempt, with this texture set taking me about 15-20h rather than the 20-30h it took last time, with more texture cards as well.

- Textures overall, I feel, were the weakest part of my previous attempt, so I focused a bit more on them this time and tried getting more appealing natural shapes. I think I somewhat succeeded and overall these are much better than my first attempt, but there is definitely still much room for growth here.

- The previous attempt had pretty thick hair strands and that was intentional, I was very scared of aliasing, transparency and hair strands going sub-pixel and not being rendered at all past certain distances. On that account, I was successful the last time, with individual hair strands being visible even in a zoomed out third person, regular gameplay scenario at 1080p resolution (which is what I play at and target). However moving closer, the thick hair just looked too cartoony and unfortunately that was the tradeoff. 

 - This time, I'm going to be a bit braver, so I have thinned out the individual hair strands in the texture a lot more, probably close to half when compared to the first. The texture looks a lot more realistic and believable because of it now and I'm sure the hairstyle will benefit too eventually in shoulder level closeups, but as mentioned, the tradeoff might be aliasing or loss of finer detail at greater distances (though if you play at higher resolutions like 1440p or 4k, it won't matter as much or at all since there's more pixels being rendered).  I don't really have enough experience with this, so this is all just an experiment to see how low I can push it. I might've gone too low this time, but worst case, I can always go back and rebake the textures with thicker hair, so no harm in trying.

- I'll be releasing one of the buffer things I made last month, soon, sometime this week, probably closer to the end of it. Will most likely be the skirt, since I've seen the most interest for it.