Mystery Girl (Patreon)

Greetings! Work continues on the next release, and while it isn't a linear process, it's progressing nonetheless. In my last report I discussed working on The Hell's quest; I thought it was a little lacking, so I went back to the concept for it and came up with some ideas I felt were much more interesting. As part of that, though, I had to switch gears and do some work on the other major quest for 0.10 (they're probably going to be related a little bit.) And as part of that I had to do a lot of work on a character who's been on the drawing board for a long time now. She's going to be pretty important later in the game, and in 0.10 you're finally going to meet her.

She's the character above, by the way. And when I say "worked on her," I mean that both in the writing and art sense. I knew more or less what she needed to do in the plot, but I hadn't spent much time on her as a character - personality, motivations, conflicts, that sort of thing - so I've been working on that. I need to make some portraits for her as part of 0.10 too, so I also spent a bit of time making her model. I thought it might help get to know her better, and I think it has!

This isn't her final design; there are a few things I don't like about this one. I chose the blue background image to lead the post, but I'm not all that enthused about the outfit. It looks nice and all, but it sorta says "slutty sorceress," which isn't the vibe I'm going for. The outfit in the yellow image is much closer to what I want, but unfortunately the outfit is giving me some problems. It doesn't really move/drape very well, so I may end up having to make my own version of a similar outfit. I've been looking for an excuse to get started with Marvelous Designer (3D clothes-making software) and this might be it!

I'm also getting ready to go through a course on hair in Blender. I wasn't really able to get Alex's hair looking good in Substance Painter because I can't find a shader that does both transparency and subsurface scattering - it seems to be either/or for some reason. Daz hair uses both, but Daz hair also kind of sucks, so I thought it might be better to make my own version in Blender (heavily inspired by the originals, of course.) Then I'll have nice looking hair with physics to boot! 

All this means that the transition to Blender renders for the H-scenes probably won't happen in 0.10, but I'm hoping to get it done in 0.11. Portraits for the "new" character will be done in Daz, but I'm not going to make more than is necessary since I'll probably redo them once I get good with Blender hair.

It hasn't been all art stuff, though! I've been doing all this so I can nail down the other major quest in 0.10, and now that the character work is pretty much done I can get to work on it. That's all I have for now - please let me know what you think of the character design, and thank you for your support!