vrengames

v0.13 Bugfixing and Render Improvements

Added 2019-02-05 01:54:44 +0000 UTC

I've been working on bug fixes and improvements for the last couple of days as we get ready for the public release of v0.13.1. Top priority for me was sorting out the differences in skin tone between the new body renders and the old face renders, which turned out to have an interesting cause.

The character images for LR2 are all generated using some automation scripts I wrote for Daz Studio. For v0.13.0 I changed the way character bodies were rendered to improve the shadowing on their shoulders and neck, which I hoped would make characters look more natural. TO achieve this in Daz I added an invisible shell that mirrored the character model. The shell occluded the character but wasn't itself visible, letting me have more accurate head shapes while still being able to layer different specific heads.

An unintended side effect of this was that the geometry shell was still used to calculate bouncing light. Because it sat just below the "skin" of the character and Daz does proper, full detail ray tracing, it ended up brightening the final image. The old face rendering technique didn't involve a geometry shell so this effect didn't show up for faces, creating the difference. Purely by accident I think the new bodies look better, so once I realised the problem it was simple to add a geometry shell to the facial render setup to produce matching skin tones. The new face images are being rendered right now and will (baring last minute disaster) make it into v0.13.1.

$10+ patrons will be getting their reward form links tomorrow!