Steamy Thoughts - Aftermath (Patreon)

So in this and the coming Aftermaths, I'll cover the technical difficulties and victories of that scene. I'm afraid this'll be a rather long one, considering the many different directions I took with this particular piece. But without further ado, let's get into it!

Realistic(er) Breasts

As mentioned in the description of the scene, I took a more realistic approach with the 'parted breasts'. Previous attempts have failed, ranging from terrible to acceptable. That's because the very start of the breasts, always end up being super wide. Breasts are supposed to have a teardrop shape, meaning it starts thin. The way the model is 'skinned', that never really happens when you take the scale too far. And that has been unknowingly bothering me since... forever. So not only did I make the breasts start out lower, they also are thinner. Only took me two years to figure that one out, whoops.

Nipples Experimentation

Yup, did that again. Unfortunately with the way I do it, I have to redo the process every time. So I couldn't salvage anything from Gwen's breasts, other than the experience. In programmer terms, you could see it as a hard-coded thing. Works in the short-term, but will be a pain in the butt in the long term. The areolas are a separate object from the breasts themselves, so editing one, means I gotta apply it to the other too. But I rather ignore the areola completely and fix it later. And fixing it later is just appealing when you're three days in. The process basically goes like this;

• Pose
• Separate the breasts (at this point changing the pose will mess with it)
• Use fancy tricks to deform the breasts
• Duplicate the area around the areola
• Apply a UVW map and the areola material to it
• Plenty of Edit Poly modifiers (editing the object)  to shape the nipple as I want it to
• Mirror and tweak it to the other nipple (if it isn't too differently shaped)

There's also the different method of using Skin Wraps, which basically follows or 'listens' the assigned object, which is really nifty for areola's, but it tends to fuck up on load when the timeline's set wrong OR when you switch through the modifiers. Long story short, I couldn't be bothered to deal with that so I took the easy route. I'd have to do some planning ahead with the template character having this Skin Wrap modifier in order to fully utilize it, but even then I doubt it's viability.

Water Effects

Not much to say about here, I've used the effect multiple times already, with the first being the worst variant of it. Though I ran into some problems because the bath was so reflective. It created effects which looked off, so I disabled the bath in the reflective & refractive calculations which solved the issue. I also started using References instead of copies. There's 3 ways to duplicate an object in 3ds Max; Copy, Instance and Reference. Copy is copying, adjust one and the other stays the same. With Instance that's shared. Edit the one and the other will adjust automatically. Really useful if you're duplicating a lot of objects that you won't change (bushes) or like to change everything (lampposts etc.). And then there's Reference, which I use to apply the water material on. References look at the main/parent object, but you can edit it further without changing the parent. So I could easily apply a UVW map and the material on it without issue. And here's the best part, adding kicks to the main object changes the other object as well! Since it's using the main object as reference. Really good stuff, saves a lot of time.

There, that's enough rambling for me for one day. Hope you've learned a thing or two from this. If not... then I hope it was somewhat interesting to read!

Link to the discussed scene