Art Stuff (Patreon)

Greetings! I apologize for the delay, I've been working on some art stuff, and I wanted to finish it before posting so I could share it with you! The big news on my end is that the new computer is done, and I've been using it to work on the art. This post is pretty long, but it contains quite a few images (hopefully that will help make it less tl;dr.) A few are final renders (like above) while many others are WIPs and such. Let's begin!

New Computer: The Bad

I prefer to get the bad stuff out of the way first, so here it is: the new computer has coil whine. If you're not aware, electronic components can sometimes physically vibrate at frequencies humans can hear, thus producing sound commonly referred to as coil whine.  Video cards are notorious for this, but many other things can do it, too. I mention this only because it's really annoying, especially when I'm trying to write, and so I've spent a whole lot of time trying to fix it. To no avail. I've tried replacing the PSU, running it from wall power instead of the UPS, unplugging case fans, changing VRM switching frequencies, undervolting the card, undervolting the CPU, disassembling and reassembling it, etc - and nothing helped. But it seems to be sort of going away, or maybe I'm just getting used to it?

New Computer: The Good

Okay, now that that's done, let me sing this computer's praises. This thing is fast, and it really helps with the art. It has an RTX 3090 (Founders Edition) GPU, and a Ryzen 9 5950X CPU, which are pretty much the best consumer level parts you can get right now. The old laptop had an i7 9850H and a Quadro RTX 5000 - pretty good for a laptop - but this computer renders around 4 times faster in Blender and about 5 times faster in Daz (!). 

I've mentioned before that in the process of working on characters or making scenes, I make a ton of renders so that I'll know what to change next. With the old system, that meant a lot of time wasted sitting around waiting for them to finish. The dramatic increase in render speed means there will be a lot less of this, making the whole art process much more efficient and fun to work on, and thus hopefully producing more and better art!

There were some unexpected benefits, too. I'd always heard "Unless you're doing CPU rendering, you don't need lots of cores, all you should worry about is single-core speed." In light of that, I thought it might have been silly to get the 5950X (a 16-core processor), but I'm glad I did because that advice is wrong. Turns out almost everything Blender does is multithreaded, and things which were janky and slow on the old system are nice and smooth now. I didn't mention this before, but posing character models and making expressions in Blender was really frustrating because it was so laggy and jerky, I guess because the models are so complex. It was really hard to get things dialed in the way I wanted them. Thankfully, that's not a problem anymore :)

The Art

But enough about the computer, let's talk about what I've been making with it! The Emily pic up top is one example. I made that one to test out a few things, and it ended up being a great learning project. I made the environment myself, and spent a ton of time mucking about in the shaders to try to fix some problems. I wish I'd spent a little more time refining the arabesque door cutout, but oh well! I was afraid the composition might be kinda weird when I started working on it, but I'm actually pretty pleased with how the whole thing turned out.

By the way, shaders are the things that tell a render (or game) engine how light should interact with an object. Whether a character has blonde hair or pink, whether a wall looks smooth or rough and textured, or whether a ball looks like shiny metal, lumpy clay, or glass - all that is controlled by the shader. Aside from lighting and composition, one of the biggest parts of getting a pleasing image is getting the shaders right. Blender handles these in a much more complex way than Daz, but Blender's approach is much more powerful if you know what you're doing. This project was a good opportunity to work on that "know what you're doing" part :)

Before I get into the rest, though - Ana wants to have a word with you. She thinks you've been very bad. I tried to tell her otherwise, but she won't listen...

That one was from Daz, of course. I haven't even started work on Ana's Blender model, but I thought some of you might appreciate seeing some of Ana and her, uh, charming personality?

Anyway, getting Emily's model wrapped up was a big part of what I worked on. The problem was that Emily's hair looked a little like a skullcap, something that was just stuck on her head. Here's the previous "final" version of Emily:

And here's the new one:

There's a few differences to walk through here, but let's start with the hair. To counter the "skullcap" thing, I'd wanted to make it look like Emily's hair was shaved on the side, much like, say, a guy's crew cut. That didn't turn out so well:

The transition from "hair" to "no hair" don't look so good. Now, I could've made the "height" of this transition different, but it just doesn't look like buzzcut hair. And there are little missing patches here and there simply because of the way I have to style it. So, because of that, I tried to lessen the "skullcap" look by making the transition around her hairline much smoother. Before, it almost looked like there was a gap between her forehead and the hair (there wasn't) but it doesn't really look that way now. Her short hair actually *does* get shorter as it goes down her head, too, it's just not all that obvious.

The next part has to do with her hair shader. First is the color - Emily was always meant to be more on the platinum blonde side, and her old shader looks more like what Alex's probably should. I also made it much shinier, which I think makes it look more stylized and thus less incongruous on her heavily-stylized character. 

The last part is her lips. Even though her hair looked like crap, I always really liked Emily's lips in Daz:

The shade of red in the Blender version was pretty off, obviously. I still might tweak it a little, but one of the big things that was missing was a mirror-like effect on the lips. 

The effect is subtle, but I think it's pretty important part of why they look so cool. It took a fair bit of mucking about in the shader, but she now has some. 

Whew! And with that, Emily's model is done (minus clothes.) I'm pretty happy with it overall; it's a definite improvement on the original, IMO. Here's some pics of Emily being expressive (I was still dialing in the hair color in some of them):

Mystery Girl Project

The next art project up is making Mystery Girl's hair in Blender, since I need her portraits for the upcoming release. I wasn't entirely happy with her hairstyle, so I started exploring other ideas (and some patrons also sent me a number of interesting ideas.) Since people seemed to like it last time, here's the final idea board:

As the final step before deciding on one, I tried finding some similar ones in Daz to see what they'd look like on her. Here's a few of the ones I was looking at:

I'm not too fond of any of them. Kinda disappointed that the pixie style didn't seem to work, but I don't think it did. I've decided I'll probably stick with something like the one I picked before. 

I'm not crazy about how much it covers her eyes - so I'll probably change that - but I like that it's big, and the fact that it's big and long (we're talking about hair here) seems to complement her design quite well. But I still might try out this goth chick looking one, since I think it could have many of the same virtues:

So, that's next. It probably won't take as long as Emily's hair, both because I'm more experienced at this sort of thing now, and because my machine is much faster. 

Hurdles to Overcome

As I've mentioned elsewhere, 0.10's H-scene will be done in Daz, but it will likely be the last Daz scene. There are a few things that I'll need to work out before the transition. At present, there are two main issues: clothing and environment shading.

As part of generally improving the game's art, I want to move to clothing that behaves like actual clothing. Moving properly with the body when someone sits down, draping properly under gravity, crumpling up against things when in contact with them, etc. Daz doesn't do this, which is one of several reasons why stuff made in Daz looks fake. Certain articles of clothing have tools that help with this, but many don't, and even when they do have it, it's pretty limited. Incidentally, this is a big reason so much Daz clothing looks like stripperwear - there's less fabric and it doesn't have to drape, so it doesn't look as fake.

Blender can do cloth simulations, but I won't be using Blender for this part. Instead, I'll be using Marvelous Designer. MD is a tool for making and animating 3D clothing - actually, the same company sells a pricier version of the same software to fashion and (real) clothing companies. They have the best fabric simulation of any 3D software. Anyway, the clothes can be passed back and forth to Blender, and so can the animations. This means I'll have to make clothing for the major characters myself; it's possible I might be able to use the Daz stuff as a base, but I'm not counting on it. I don't see this as a bad thing, though - it's really an opportunity to revise the character designs to better fit what I want from them. 

I haven't done much with MD at this point, so I'll need to do a course on it and then do a couple of clothing projects to get the hang of things. After Mystery Girl's hair is done, I'll get to work on 0.10's H-scene, and then I'll probably start in on MD.

The other challenge in switching to Blender is environments. Getting some experience with this is one reason I made that image of Emily in the sandy room, and it was pretty instructive. I can make simple environments now, but most of the ones I'll want to use will be more complex. For those, I'll need to rely on stuff imported from Daz, but there are some problems with this. The importer I use is frankly amazing, and does a good job on most things most of the time, but it does fail pretty badly sometimes. Specifically, it sometimes translates shaders pretty poorly.

As an example, have a look at these images. The first one is a Daz environment, and the second is the same one imported into Blender.

I'm sure I could improve the lighting to make the Blender one look better, but it would still look pretty bad in comparison. What this needs to truly fix it is for me to go in and tweak/replace/redo the shaders. And this requires getting good with Blender's way of doing shaders.

The good news is that I have been getting better at it. The Emily sand room picture required a lot of this sort of thing, as did fixing Emily's lip shader. 

Conclusion

Anyway, I think I'll be able to create some pretty cool stuff once I switch over to Blender. I haven't even started messing with fluid and particle effects yet! My goal is to make this game's art as good as I possibly can, and it would be nice to maybe have the option to do some animations as well! And I think Blender is the way to do that.

That's all I have for now. After all this art stuff, I think it's time to go pretty hard at the writing, and that's probably what I'll talk about next time. Thank you for your support!