Inner Circle Update for July 9 2018! (Patreon)

Hey guys!

A bit late with the update here. Overall this hasn’t been too great a week as far as progress goes, but there also haven’t been any major issues, so that’s a plus I guess. I spent a few days organizing and cleaning hard drives since I hadn’t done so thoroughly since about February, and because our cloud drive was down to 12 GB free >_>. Uber had to go out of the country for family related stuff and will be away a few more days. AltairPL’s mom has been in and out of the hospital, so he’s been preoccupied there.  That’s the bad news, but there are a few things to show off nonetheless. 

Maya Conversion Progress

The police enemy’s body is now converted to Genesis 3, as well as the UVs for his textures. The next step is to convert his armor props, but that’s a TK thing and he hasn’t gotten a chance to tackle it yet. Amidst his hysterical screams about rigging though I did make out that he’s remodeled Malise’s gloves and boots to work in Maya. If you recall from the monthly update, they utilized Daz’s HD morphs, something not compatible with Maya.

TK and I spent a lot of time these past few days on genitals, which has taken some more effort than anticipated. TK had to come up with a process for remapping the UVs for the girly parts, and after that I was able to get some pretty good results with the materials.  We can definitely do better with some more time, but right now working with materials is a bit like wading through a swamp. There’s a lot of overhead and setup time I have to do, especially for polished renders, since we’re not quite ready to be working with the rigged figures yet.  On that note, there are some definite rigging improvements TK will be able to make to the gens that will improve the shape, scale, and stretching. 

Here are the full-size renders shown above :D. I was planning on doing more stuff with liquid for these, but I figured there are more important things to do right now.

Gens Conversion / Materials Test

Gens Conversion / Materials Gape Test 

For the male gens, we are probably good to go with the system we are using now for the cop enemy, but for more exposed characters we’ll need to switch to another system that uses geo-grafts, which actually connects the geometry to the body. Right now, we’re using a system that uses opacity textures to blend the genitals geometry with the body, and this creates a nasty discolored seam due to subsurface scattering where the two overlap. This shouldn’t be a very big inconvenience though.

Onyx’s Weapon Shop

Mr. Kittyhawk has been putting a lot of effort into props for this map. After I gave him some pointers he took over for me on weapons materials. Here’s a set of conversions he was able to complete. There are actually a ton more, I just haven’t gotten to render them @_@.

• Melee Weapons
• Submachine Gun 1
• Submachine Gun 2
• Crossbow

He’s also been working on the store’s counter and has a really solid work-in-progress design for that. Since It will be front and center for some story scenes I decided we needed Uber’s super advanced hard-surface skills to add the details to the model. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to get his 3D apps working well on his laptop and trying to do it through Teamviewer wasn’t working out for him, so we’re kind of out of luck on that until he gets back. Instead he’s been running photogrammetry tests to see if we could utilize it for quickly generating interior clutter / props. This is basically the art of making 3D scans of real world objects using photos that get turned into a point cloud using special software. The point cloud is then turned into a useable 3D mesh, and the texture info from the scans can be used to create materials. He’s been quite successful at using it for outdoor props for his schoolwork.  It’s less forgiving on inorganic objects, and the detail isn’t good enough to use for anything close to the camera, but it could end up being useful for maps, which are rendered at distance and can simply have errors smoothed out / painted over. 

Uber and I have mostly figured out the layout and design for the map / cutscenes, so hopefully he and Mr. Kittyhawk will be able to burn it down pretty quickly once he’s back. 

TK’s Rigging for Maya Conversion Update

Y'ever think you're done with something, but once the dust settles, you discover you're not? I've still a little ways to go for the Maya rig, but it's for the naughty bits and probably worth a little attention, eh? I knocked a lot off my todo list and have Malise at the very least fully configured in Daz for her trip to Maya and ran some more tests. I discovered all the crotch controls and morphs get ignored unless they're currently in use on a figure, but those only get 'baked' in to the figure on export. Luckily I found a helpful tip that led me to a neat little merge function that isn't normally part of the UI, so that's solved.

A majority of this week has seen me spreadsheeting out the extras for the leg, breast and vagina controllers. Eromancer had picked up some very useful kits that add a lot of nice ways to move and shape these parts. The downside is that while they're easy to use, they're a bit complicated behind the curtain. Switch A flips these lights, switch B does one of those and another light, switch C just goes bang... a big tangle of wires! There's no efficient way to get an overview of the controls, I just gotta go through them one by one and make notes. The upside to the method in Daz is that the presentation and usage is way cleaner than Maya, not that it helps much now :D

Anyway, the reason to be meticulous for these bits is that many of the controllers are combinations of morphs, joint movements and other controllers. I'll spare you all the details, but the results aren't pretty if they're exported without being modified first. I need to break them down to be only morphs for the export, then reconstruct the rest in Maya via scripting.

Since I already have a lot of script written and learned most the ropes already, creating this aspect of the rig will go a lot smoother, so that's a plus.

Uber’s Texture Projection Idea

One last thing I thought was worth mentioning is a method Uber came up with for speeding up liquid compositing. I mentioned previously that to get liquid looking really pro we needed up to three separate render passes and composite them in post – something that can get time consuming. Uber’s method is one used in the film industry often and would allow us to get the same or better results with just one render pass. 

The basic idea is instead of mapping textures to the liquid model, we’d project them from the camera and mask them with the liquid’s geometry. What this means is I can take a really quick test render, then use it to paint a mask to remove liquid or wetness, then project it as an opacity map from the camera.  Even better, we can use it as an extinction map to make liquid more translucent but retain reflections – something more realistic than can be attained by editing in post. 

For the best results, the method will take a bit of finagling to fit smoothly in our workflow, since making it hassle-free it depends on having the projection nodes set up and ready to introduce into materials quickly. This is something that will be easier once we have our materials management system set up in Maya.