More places and some faces (Patreon)

Hello everyone, I'm going to show you some places that I haven't shown you yet. If you are already tired of this theme. scroll down,  I'll deal with something more interesting later

Mika lives in an apartment in this small white building. Maybe she needs a little help from Brendon and Angel, or maybe there will be another character paying her a visit.

This is Wanda's studio building, which Brendon introduces himself to for his new job. I think this part of the script is very sexy, it deserves to be done with care.

The Campus where Nicole studies.  It may not look like any campus you know, but there are many different campuses around the world, and this is one of them.

Nora's store in Oldtown.

Crankshaw family home, where Angel Crankshaw lives.

And the main house.

I've also gone ahead with setting up the interiors and adding more  variety to the textures, but enough about the backgrounds for now, I want to talk about the characters.

From the beginning, I wanted to use hand-painted textures on the  characters, but I believed that I would need to pay an artist to achieve this result. Before that was possible, I standardized the topology of the characters to fit Daz3D's textures, which are the same models used in most of the visual novels you might be familiar with. The problem is that these textures are made for realistic characters, not for cartoons.

I've  been studying an alternative for weeks. My first attempt was to use  filters to transform the textures I already had, but it didn't turn out very well. Then I tried to generate AI characters in different positions to put the parts together and form the textures. Like everything  involving AI at the moment, it ended up being a lot of work and not very  productive.

So I saw no alternative but to try to paint it  myself. I dusted off my old Wacom Bamboo and prepared Penny to be painted in Blender.

The old texture had nothing I wanted to take advantage of so I filled in  all the skin with a base color. Blender allows me to see the image  flat, so it's not much different than painting in Photoshop, with the  advantage of being able to rotate the image in all directions.

I liked the result on the face so I went on to the rest of the body. One  advantage of painting the texture is being able to enhance the volume of the shapes, which I now see as a complementary part of the modeling work. And with a few strokes, we have a nipple.

The green eyes are also easy to do when trying for a cartoony result.  And then I created a special brush to paint the freckles more easily, again it's very similar to what I would do in Photoshop.

I chose to start with Penny precisely because of the difficulty of  freckles. In the end, the most difficult were the eyebrows and eyelashes, I preferred to do these parts in Gimp.

The result was far from perfect, but it's much better than I thought it  would be, very good for a first try. Penny looks like a new girl. But all that matters is how it will look in the game in real-time. So I tried a before-and-after with the new texture.

Now, that did surprise me. I don't even know how I could find the old textures acceptable. 😲

But let's try to make it a little more difficult. One of the advantages  of using textures from Daz is that I could use the tattoo packs. The downside is seeing the same tattoos in several other games. Besides, realistic tattoos don't match cartoon characters.

So I experimented with more cartoony tattoos. I overlay the drawings in Gimp and finished painting the details in Blender.

And that's how I redid the textures of the redheaded sisters. See the result in the video.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZdAnb6gynTrGffVgW9VLVu9a8c1HKyfp/view?usp=sharing

As you can imagine, I will have a long week repainting the other  characters, but it will be worth it. I'm glad it worked out and I'm looking forward to seeing all the other characters with this new look.

Thanks a lot for your support. See you later.