Progress: Naotora Ii and Vella (Patreon)

This time it's not all the characters because Vella's hair was difficult, but something good (sort of) came out of it.

Naotora Ii:

• Almost finished, the neckseam is as gone as it can be. 
• I made a small mole for her left breast.
• I'm gonna look into a small problem with her front hair alpha that makes it so that you can see part of the border from far away. It's probably the mip maps.

Vella:

• Her hair was very difficult, contrary to what I believed, because it's yet another hair with no proper ordering and a lot of overlapping polygons. Seems the original game either used just alpha testing or combined it with alpha blending.
• I found a way to combine both alpha testing and alpha blending without losing the ability to change the hair color. You pretty much do the same you do in Skyrim: Combine a model that uses alpha testing with a model that uses alpha blending, disable z-write in the alpha blending model, so that it kinda doesn't care about alpha sorting. 
• But since that causes a very non-euclidean look to the mesh (parts behind the camera show up on front of the hair, it's hard to describe), you use the alpha testing model with a high cut-out and z-write enabled, sorted after the alpha blending model, to fix this. 
• The only problem this method has is the same as in Skyrim's modded hairs, sometimes it can look a bit rough around the edges (literally), but that can be fixed with transparency antialiasing.
• Besides the hairs, I had to retexture the eyelashes because they were a whooping 128x128 texture.
• Already did the lips and eyeshadow overlays.
• The eyes are still not done, these are vanilla.
• The face textures still need work, the occlusion map is doing stuff I don't like.
• I'll start working on the expressions along with Cortana's expressions this weekend.

The good thing about what I found out with Vella, is that I can now use hairs that have lots of overlapping polygons and still use alpha blending while keeping the hair coloring, so no need to use alpha testing alone or lose the hair coloring. 

Anyways, that's it for now. Naotora this weekend.

See you!