WIP Thursday - Babe&Tonic (Patreon)

Hello! Here is next wip dump!
Animation and artwork is soon done, have run into some problems as usual, its more technical this time around. Instead of a wall of text, let me try and show you.

Caustics...

A simple effect, many may think, a simple task thanks to the hundreds of tutorials and even natural feature of blender 3.1.
Short answer.. No.
I though it was going to be a simple take, given the very common effect in water.

After following many tutorials, I found one that was giving the desired look.
The only problem here was that caustics where cast in parts that had shadow and should not receive the effect, but nothing so far to stop that either.

Blender natural feature was not able to deal with objects that had SSS or complex geometry under water, due to its transmission motor, I spendt hours trying to figure out a solution before giving up on it.
The error was sharp shadows on her body. Nothing online since this feature is in alpha stage.

Since this caustic tutorial only took hight for a sun placed directly above, I used a sphere to determine the caustics rotational location according to the suns position WITH the added water level limitor node.

But after many days, caustics is now working properly, and ready to be animated. I will not reveal the final result, as it will spoil the artwork. Since we are close to a release anyways =)

Next error was the peacfuzz hair, I never had a problem with it before, but now I did.
I'm not even going to bother trying to figure out if it was the blender version or my settings.
I was able to solve this after many hours yet again by softening the HDRI I used, and make sure the hairs did not stand straight up, but follow the body to remove their change to cast long shadows.

Next was Njorijannas hair, she had to have the hair BSDF adjusted since the sun was so strong in this render. Took some hours to perfect. The problem with blonde hair in artificial bright scenes is that it just turns white and exposure is too strong.