Inner Circle Update for May 7 2018! (Patreon)

Hey guys!

It’s been a really good week. We’ve solved a lot of problems that should pave the way for the new liquids workflow, and ultimately will make the process faster and more flexible. Not only that, but we’re now able to convert texture-based liquids to 3D! Soon we’ll have both 3D armor damage and fluids! This is not only a major milestone for being able to use the new lighting system on all artwork; it’s something I’ve wanted to accomplish since starting the project. It’s a big step for us in making quality real-time 3D H-games a possibility down the line. 

Substance Painter and Fluids

The new liquid workflow dominated most of our time this week. That said, it should be very worth it because we were able to make some of the best breakthroughs yet in terms of both speeding up the creation of and improving the control/quality of fluids. 

In the monthly update I talked about using texture-based liquids and starting to learn Substance Painter to be able to paint the textures directly on the 3D models. Uber and TK both have experience with the program, so it’s been a bigger learning curve for me. That said, I have a solid foundation now for the workflow that I’ll likely be using for adding fluids to anything not requiring all-out simulation. Here are some examples of my results for Malise’s high-lust wetness in Substance Painter!

Malise Wet - Front

Malise Wet – Back

Malise Wet – Front Orthogonal

TK and Ubercharge’s Houdini Magic

The above was made possible because Uber and TK put a lot of work into a couple of Houdini networks that’s able to take image stamps (used for Photoshop brushes) and generate high quality height data, and subsequently create 3D models of the liquid from it. I’ve got a pretty extensive Photoshop brush library devoted just to fluids from working with the old art style, so we’ve been spending time running these through Uber’s converter. Luckily he was able to automate it, so it’s been going smoothly!

Once we have the height data, I’m able to create very accurate Substance Painter brushes that I can use as a starting point for painting on any 3D model (characters/props/whatever). Here’s a comparison showing what I was able to achieve last week with just an image stamp, and what we’re able to do now.  

The biggest breakthrough though is that Uber was able to achieve displacement utilizing 3D normals of a model. What this means is I can paint in Substance using these high quality brushes, then send the finished characters *back* to the Houdini network and generate 3D models of the fluids as if they were on the characters (simple test example shown :D). With this kind of capability, we could even rig fluid to follow posing/animations. 

For our current purposes, being able to generate 3D fluid models from textures means that we can use our subsurface-based cum material in Daz that we created for the simulation fluids. 

Anyways, there are still a lot of little things we have to accomplish to be able to use all of this effectively (automating UV prepping and material surfaces going from Daz to Substance Painter for instance), so it will be an ongoing thing as we ramp up our use of liquids in the artwork.

Motion Blur!

Something we lost when changing to the new rendering engine is motion blur. Uber was able to get it working in Redshift easily enough, but for whatever reason Daz’s half-baked implementation of Iray simply doesn’t offer it, so we’ve had to come up with something else. Luckily, it turns out we’re now able to add film-quality vector-based motion blur in post! 

The new, more physically accurate art style supports this effect a lot better, and it is something I’ll utilize for action frames, enemy attack frames, and H artwork. 

The downside is that Iray doesn’t support the vector render pass needed to achieve this in post, so I have to actually paint it. Luckily that’s very simple (it looks something like this), and I’ll even be able to do it from within my automation network. 

Until I’m able to implement it there (I’ll need to reorganize some stuff), I cooked up an example with Malise as a proof of concept for you to check out. 

AltairPL’s Coding Progress

Today's update will be pretty short, since I had some concentration problems lately (freaking spring) and instead of doing what I should be doing I was jumping around the code doing stuff that could wait for much later. At least it will become useful at some point, so not like it was completely wasted time.

Anyway, roughly around the time the monthly update was posted, I started fixing the knockdown pose during hold issue. It required making some changes to the portraits system, and while implementing those changes I started thinking about some other changes, improvements, optimizations, etc. Well, this was my first major detour, but I finally got my shit together and fixed the issue with the knockdown.

The fix for that issue was another good use for a portrait system improvement I implemented pretty recently, and since it's working even better than I hoped, I started thinking about other uses for it. I made some extensive notes about it, and while it was still fresh on my mind, I decided to implement one of those things since it was brought up recently during one of the Battle Test releases. I'm talking about player characters changing poses rapidly as a result of enemy actions. This should be much better now, though it's still not perfect, and I'm afraid it's as good as it gets.

That's pretty much it for the major stuff. The rest of the time was spent on random changes to code and comments, refactoring, renaming, cleaning up, etc.

Armor Damage Mock-up

Amidst all the work on fluids, TK has made some progress on Malise’s armor damage as well :D. He’s masked out the damage on the 3D model so that we could test whether my concept was accurate and do some preliminary pose testing. We’ve identified only a couple potential problem areas, and overall it’s way better than anticipated. He’ll likely refine the mask some more after examining the problem areas, and then use it as a guide to start the new model.