Character View Renders (Patreon)

Greetings!

I'm still working on renders for the Character View feature. I thought it would be pretty straightforward, but I forgot I also had to do them for all the Bunnies (as well as Mae!), and I was also forced to do some revision of the Bunnies' character models. I always knew I'd need to do it eventually (since some of them will appear in H-scenes) but I'd hoped to kick the can down the road a bit longer. Alas, it wasn't to be!

In the process of making the new character and revising Ana and Alex's hair to overcome a change in the rendering engine, I learned a little more about hair. Hair has always been one of Daz's weaknesses, and if you've seen much Daz stuff, you probably know what I'm talking about. It frequently has a wispy, insubstantial look that succeeds neither in looking real nor in looking good. Some of the hair I'd used for the Bunnies had this look, and leaving it as it was would have really bugged me, so I did some work to make it look better. This mostly involved hand-painting opacity maps, though I also changed other stuff about the shader. I prepared a couple of images with Cory's hair to show you what I'm talking about. The first one is the original hair:

And here's the revised hair:

It's not a night-and-day difference, but the hair looks thicker, shinier, less 'wispy', and fits better with my overall aesthetic. Note that I didn't take the time to clean up around the ears like I would for 'production' images, but this should give you an idea of what I'm talking about.

I also had to do some tweaking to the shapes of most Bunnies' models. I'd just concentrated on faces before, since portraits were all I was making, but since you're able to see their whole bodies doing a better job with the bodies suddenly became important. I had to do two renders for each of the Bunnies - one naked and one not - and just for fun I'll go ahead and share Shiri's naked pic:

She looks hurt because she can't believe someone would strip her naked like that. But you wouldn't do that to poor Shiri, would you?

Though postwork still remains, I've finished the actual renders for all the Bunnies now and am currently at work on Mae (Shiri's friend from the Oracle quest.) I've already fixed her hair, I just need to tweak her face/body a bit and then pose her. After that I have a few more renders for the PC for 'game screen' character view left to do, then I can get the test build out.

I hope you had a good Thanksgiving (those of you who celebrate it), and I thank you for your support!