WIP Day - Virtual metamorphosis (Patreon)

Some problems has presented itself.

Firstly, the blender itself.
I was running out of GPU memory in the latest artwork, therfore I was unable to render more images of it as part of the new workflow as of late, sorry about that.
The good news is that I was able to locate the error after a week of tinkering with it.

The issue was 16k texture maps, for those who did not read the devlog, I went into detail there, so the short story was:
"one 16k texture map, lets say a normal map weight 50mb or even a 100mb. blender then stores that in video memory ALONG with a cache double its size. and njorijanna used 10 of them, meaning that lone ate up 10gb of vram, now times that with 3x 30gb of vram, now add a scene 40gb of vram, ANNNNNDDD! the freaking particles. towels, hairs, vellus hair, everything with particles also uses vram, and that alone could peak 15gb for those 3."

And in the process of finding the error, I was able to upgrade to the new blender 3.6, pros and cons all the way, while updates are often important, my work pipeline was stable and good as it was, so there was not any reason to change anything, until now.
In the new blender, things are more efficient and has a ton of new features, some of my old addons needed to be updates and it all was a chainreaction of eachother. So after some days of testing it was stable once again. (unstable due to heavy scenes and uncharted territory in the sense of physics and bindings)

Next was to make a brand new Njori, this time, even more real and with the ability to talk and have an wide range of expressions that will help us down the road.

What we needed here then was to create her in another software that has the expressions and rig in place with the correct weights, then export her back to blender through an advanced pipeline, since this program create both skin and detail textures, its way below what I want in terms of quality and fidelity, so that part I have to do again. As you can see here:

I even tried Ai to improve their normals up from 4k to 8k, but its not good enough even then.

So, next was the very time consuming and hard job of RE-SCULPTING her entire figure down to every pore and creaseline. After many days it was done. I was dreading this, but no time to waste.

First was to improve the Uv layout to ensure a perfect bake once the sculpt was done.

I sat down and after many days of working 8-10 hours straight, it was done.
Then beings the Baking of this sculpt to textures, cause at this point she was peaking almost 100 million vertexes...

The bake was also not without errors, there was an old problem I encountered again, the white artifacts, so I had to go into photoshop and manually remove it and repair the bakes, there was no other way. This took days.

(Yes, this is Njorijannas fingerprint. 16k bakes, to be reduced to 4k and 8k depending on scene)

Cause one has to be careful, black dots here represent pores, white dots represent moles or rough skin, but large white dots are artifacts.

Then with an altered uv map, many of the old textures like my custom veins map had to be altered/repaired. As seen here, but all for the better, less stretch this time around.

So without more talk, here is the result so far. The details are... Impeccable.

The result of this hard work and long hours is always worth it...

The body is working animation wise, tho no jiggles are ported over from the old v3600 (v3) LGGF to the new v4, the movements speak for themselves and works great!

Some more lengthy videos and images in the attachments.

Next is to port over all the shaders, nails, skin, blushmaps etc, then to implement the trademark juicy Lustgard jiggle system, hair, eyes and teeth.

Thank you for your continued support during this short downtime, we are soon back in business, and this time... With much more resource efficient files and workflow for more rapid content that are easier to work with.

In Lust We Trust

- Alluringsteed