Inner Circle Update for July 30 2017! (Patreon)
Content
I wanted to drop by and give you guys a sneak peak of what I’m trying to get ready for the monthly update! Before I do though I want to clarify something regarding the last post (on the 27th) since I saw some people may have misunderstood my intent. I wasn’t suggesting we were putting off v0.06 to work on the Maya conversion; merely that we spent a few days following up on my initial test after it was successful to get a better idea of whether the idea was actually feasible (and based on our tests it probably is). The conversion wouldn’t actually take place until after v0.06. I’ll make sure to adjust that news for the monthly update for clarity.
New Enemy!
I tossed around the idea of adding a female police enemy in to v0.06, and went for it after I realized I could work in a neat little story event as an introduction. She’s still a work in progress, but hopefully I’ll have something closer to the final version once the monthly update rolls around. Here are the full high resolution images!
About the Artwork
So, you’ll notice straight away that the art is different for this character. That’s because this is the first character I’ve created entirely with the intent to use a physically based rendering (PBR) engine. I had expressed concern over mixing art assets created between the new/old rendering engines for v0.06, but I figure I’d rather get the experience and have the opportunity to develop the new artwork style in advance of the artwork overhaul than to simply strive for consistency with an artwork style we are probably moving past anyways.
I’ll have a more thorough set of images detailing the process for this character in the monthly update, but I’ll point out that she is in a lot of ways an experiment due to having to create new PBR materials and to test various lighting situations to see how they behave. We’re really trying to avoid the use of cheesy post processing filters this time around (such as heavy outlines without the stylized assets to support them), and one area this makes things a bit difficult is layering portraits onto backgrounds or map artwork and not having them clash. When everything gets run through a filter it makes things mesh quite nicely, but with this style we have to rely on informed lighting choices and more advanced techniques.
Some things I think are obvious improvements are the possibilities for improved detail in materials, Fresnel reflections (this is a staple in getting an animated look out of modern 3D), accurate translucency (see the light shining through the hair), and way better skin due to subsurface scattering.
Keep in mind the style is still in the early stages and will probably develop quite a bit, and also that this is simply one example, but definitely let me know what you think so far! Oh, and just to clarify, the “new style” is entirely about the rendering, lighting, materials/shaders, and processing methods, and has nothing to do with body shapes or character anatomy.