Progress - She is almost there! (Patreon)

Warning - Long Post due to Images and Screenshots.
First and foremost, I'm honestly sorry for this delay on releasing the Wolf Lady. Below should be some slight explanatory reasons why this delay happened.

My god, why do I challenge myself sometimes is honestly beyond me at this point. The creation of this wolf lady was going smooth until I decided to make freaking Fur/Hair Shaders and actually something that can be used in VaM.

Prior to this point, I only did simple Shaders like 2 sided plane etc. But not this god awful complexity.  

This all started when I downloaded this free Grass Shader and was like, wait a minute... with some tweaks, I could turn this into Fur Shader. Thus my suffering started. I played around with this Shader for roughly 2 days until I managed to get something working 😶

At this point, I was exhilarated "Ahhhh all the possibilities!!!!" I said grinning. Not knowing what is coming is going to be one of the most frustrating things I have ever made lol. 

So at this point believing I managed to lock this, I decided to park it and go do some morphs for the she wolf. That went smoothly as I'm used to this as of now. 

Locking the ears down They actually look good on the Daz Figure too at this point.

Moving forward I went and made the feet/hands.

After locking down the morphs, I decided to go back and now actually start working on the Fur. 

As got my hands on Miki's wonderful Hell Hound Hair, loaded it up, went through it for an inspiration. As the Original Concept design did use it... I then started to create my own as mostly the thing I was looking for was the Physics tab on his Flair for the fur. 

Afterword's I moved on and went to my roots, creating limbs based fur for the her claws.

After clearing all that, I went and start to look for a hair that would suit this look, I honestly couldn't find any. So I was like 🙄... Maybe it's time to create my own? You be the judge!

She is honestly shaping up nicely, I'm very proud of the work thus far!

This is where 💩hit the fan so to speak, as I decided to open up the unity project to continue working on the Shader...

So loading the project, I managed to get the tail looking good etc, then I imported it to VaM, and found this result.

First, It was pitch black. Second, all the hairs are pointed to one orientation, not following any and all logic, you turn the tail 360 degrees and the hairs will still point north, I felt like I created a compass at this point 😅.

I dug deeper and tried several things, probably to note as well, I'm targeting the black color first.

I went through various documentations and started to go back on the Shader Code modifying stuff, until; i stumbled onto lighting. Apparently, the object was not getting lit by Point Light inside VaM. It was only taking Directional light, which at this stage it meant I needed to figure out a way to get the Shader to do that.

I honestly struggled there for roughly 5 days. Then out of frustration, I messaged my good old pal DJSoapyKnuckles  he was kind enough to... how to say this accurately. Suffer with me? 🤣

And thus the dual suffering commenced. With many trial and errors we managed to narrow down the problems into just 1 problem. Below you see how the tail only reads Directional Light.

It took us another 5 days, but we cracked the bitch. We even got the freaking fur to react to orientation plus gravity, just 2 guys that have no clue how does Shader works managed to make this work 😃

So putting all that together, this is the final result of the collective effort thus far.

Now probably, I will be working exclusively on refinement. Mostly texture/fur, then we could have a date with her this weekend if all the stars aligned 😘

Thank you for being patient and going through this long post, just felt adamant to let you know of the progress.