Inner Circle Update for December 17 2017! (Patreon)

Hey guys,

We’ve clearly been on too much of a roll lately, because we’ve been dealt a pretty rough week. We are dealing with a couple setbacks, and even worse TK lost an immediate family member. I think working on stuff is helping him, though.  

There is good news, and that’s that the biggest setback is kind of fortuitous. It’s largely due to us finding a much better way to do something that hasn’t been working very well in our new rendering engine, and has been the source of a lot of frustration when rendering the new characters (Neon especially). Nevertheless, there’s no shortage of stuff to talk about, so I’ll get on with it!

Neon's Bike - Iray Conversion

Before I get into the messy stuff, one good thing I accomplished early on this week was getting Neon’s bike converted over to Iray so that I can revamp the story scene where Neon and Malise ride into New Babylon at the beginning of v0.06. If you recall, that was one of the scenes I had finished (way) before we began the conversion to the new art style. Anyways, it was while working on this that I discovered the previously mentioned thing that, while a setback now, will help us down the road. 

Neon Conversion to Genesis 3

Fair warning >_>, the next two paragraphs are techno-babble heavy.

While working on the bike I discovered the source of a bug that I’ve been dealing with since we converted Neon’s armor materials over. The bug would seemingly randomly cause the rendering engine (Iray) to switch from using the graphics cards to the CPU; something GPU renderers do when they’ve run out of video RAM. This is turbo bad, and basically locks down the computer for something like 10 minutes while Iray tries to initialize the render with the CPU (I opt to just restart everything, which is the next best thing to blasting it with a shotgun). Well, it turns out Iray is reporting incorrect VRAM usage -- and the main culprit in most of our cases is displacement mapping… something that we use pretty heavily and is all over Neon’s armor. 

Displacement mapping (also called parallax mapping in games) is a technique for generating faux geometry from textures. Well, turns out Iray creates *actual* geometry… which saves no resources whatsoever, and eats up VRAM like crazy. The saving grace here is that while I was converting Neon’s bike I discovered good ol’ bump mapping works extremely well in Iray at very high levels, and even looks better than Iray’s displacement mapping does on assets that weren’t designed with its displacement algorithm in mind (most of our assets weren’t, and this can cause some really nasty artifacts). The downside is you lose out on the parallax effect that displacement offers, meaning that while lighting looks great, large features look very obviously flat. Since Neon’s armor has a lot of these features, we’ve decided that TK will optimize the models for use with bump mapping by adding the larger features straight into the geometry. While it may seem relatively minor, the benefits of this are: 

• Saving my sanity by not having to restart my PC every time I want to render Neon
• Saving my sanity by speeding up my viewport from a crawl when working with Neon’s render-ready assets
• Not having weird melty metal blobs all over one of our main characters from displacement artifacts

Since editing the base models for her armor will require re-rigging it, we’ve decided to kill two birds with one stone and knock out her Genesis 3 conversion now. While this will be more beneficial later, the one immediate benefit is that it will allow us to use the new genital system with Neon. So far we’ve made pretty good progress, and have also identified a couple obstacles to overcome to make this happen. In this image you’ll see where we're at, with the base Genesis 3 figure wearing the armor. I haven't set up Neon's body shape yet.  As you can see, we’ve got the morphs for where the fleshy bits connect to the armor working. We also have a start on rigging, but unfortunately re-rigging it causes some distortion to the models that TK needs to correct. I should be able to get Neon’s face converted to Genesis 3 within a day or less since I did it with Malise already, and beyond that TK will spend some time modeling in the features we lose by not using displacement mapping. All of her skin textures are already Genesis 3 compatible, so there’s no time lost there. In the mean-time I have crap tons of other stuff to work on, so it shouldn’t be a bottleneck on our progress at least.

New Genitals 

This is our other setback. This is pretty much from not having enough time to experiment and hash out some new-found issues with the genitals, which is what I’ve been working on the past day. The issues are mostly related to Malise’s body shape, but the fixes I make will carry over to other Genesis 3 characters as well. These shouldn’t take too long.

Universal Wet Mapping, and Geo-Grafting

In other news, it’s always fun to see new techniques working out in the finished art. I hope you guys are liking these images I’ve been posting for each update; while they’re largely unnecessary and do consume development time, they’ve been extremely helpful for practicing with the new art style, which I’m beginning to feel quite confident with. Not only that, but I try to make them serve as examples for new techniques we’ve figured out since the last update. One thing this Malise pic shows is our work on wet-mapping. Even though we’re pretty much without Ubercharge this month due to his concept art apprenticeship, he’s taken some time to hash out some experiments which should allow us to easily and quickly make any material we need to look wet. He also needs to re-register his Redshift from the looks of it :D.  In the Malise image at the top I purposely made her boots wet, whereas the gloves of the same material are dry to show the difference. Taking this a step further with masking in post, we should be able to make our 3D simulated slime and cum a whole lot more realistic. 

Another thing I want to point out in the image is the skin bulges around the gloves/boots. This is the effect we’d like to replicate with armor damage. We are planning on doing this with geo-grafts much like the nipples and genitals (geometry that replaces parts of the Genesis 3 model, but also behaves as part of the body system). TK did some rough testing with Daz geo-grafts and they were pretty successful; they inherit joint correction morphs from the Genesis 3 figure, which was one of our major obstacles preventing us from doing this with Victoria 4.

Oi.  Well, that's about it for now.  Hopefully next week goes smoother and we have more steps forward than back.