colortwist

Poolside scene (final), 3/3

Third shot of the finished poolside scene.

Poolside scene (final), 2/3

Second shot of the finished poolside scene.

Poolside scene (final), 1/3

Whelp, I think this particular scene is finally done.

Newest additions are the towels, which were real fun to do. Not only did they require a rather specific setup to try and get the dynamics reasonably natural, but I had to go back and redo the way the fabric loops were created. I wasn't happy with how they were all pointing in random directions before, which tended to create a very rough and oddly flat appearance from afar. The new system handling them tries to replicate the look and ...

Fuzzy Towel

A fuzzy towel.

Hopefully this is the last piece of the poolside scene puzzle. I'd previously mentioned that I wanted some nice warm fuzzy towels to drape over the chairs and what not, and these are the best I can do at the moment, so... yeah.

PS: apparently there was some confusion as to whether or not this was a photograph, so a viewport screenshot of the scene (pre-render) is attached.

Character update - 13/07/19

So... I'm still here, and still plugging away at things.

Long story short, I finally finished writing my hair plugins (following the same general technique described in the last post). The good news is that they seem to work exceptionally well. I don't quite have everything integrated into the character rig as much as I'd like, but at the very least it's already gotten me "riggable" hair guides that follow around with the head which is all I really wanted in the first place.

The b...

Volumetric hair rigging and shoulder sliding

This is something I've been working on recently. I was really hoping to be in production by now with that image sequence I previously mentioned, but once again various technical limitations have crept up and gotten in the way.

This time it was the hair.

Long story short, my insistence on using actual 3D hair (rather than polygon strips with a hair texture applied to them) has finally swung around to bite me in the ass. I've always known that the systems involved were fairly inflex...

Poolside WIP - 01/07/19

Yet another poolside WIP screenshot, this time with some experimental butt pokey physics (because why not?).

Still need to fix a lot of things in this image. Not really happy with the scene lighting, the hair system is kinda messed up in regards to externally referenced files, and I'm still missing the towels for the chair.

Fake(ish) wet footprints

I'm probably going to catch some flak for spending an entire day building wet footprints, but the way they looked in my last test render was kinda driving me nuts, so...

Long story short, the way I'm generating floor tiles is kinda weird (technically every tile is different and none of them repeat the same detail twice), which makes it exceptionally difficult to map a secondary texture onto them without killing render performance or having to deal with 16k or 32k texture maps. Furthermo...

Fake(ish) water caustics

Pretty early on, I'd decided that I wanted to try and recreate the effect you get when light reflects off the surface of water in order to create the illusion that there was an actual pool in this scene (hint: there's not), but to also try and break up the monotony around the ceiling (since that's probably where a lot of my characters are going to land up).

Unfortunately in this particular case, I needed something that could be seamlessly tiled within Arnold as a slide map to cover a fa...

Carried Away VR

Here's some VR versions for the Carried Away scene.

Resolution is 8192x8192 in over/under format (8192x4096 per frame) with an IPD of approximately 65mm.

All three angles are included in the attached zip file- originally I was going to post these as individual images, but the PNG files are close to 50mb/piece and I've found some browsers tend to choke when trying to view an image that large.

AFAIK, these should be compatible with any VR image viewing program like Whirligig. ...

Poolside WIP - 29/06/19

Just a quick WIP with some actual stuff in the scene this time.

Still need to fix a ton of stuff (the wet footprints are kinda crappy, the lighting is a bit whack, and I need to redo a bunch of internal character controls so they behave better with the external references I'm using to keep everything modular inside the scene), but I guess progress is progress... hopefully.

Buoys

Another totally random render of some pool scene props.

Not much else to say other than that.

Lämp

More props from the pool scene.

Don't ask me why, but apparently I have a thing for semi-accurate lighting optics. It always bothers me when light appears to be coming from a source that doesn't appear like it could be emitting that light, and a good part of that effect usually comes from how that source looks at a variety of different angles.

Anyways, these aren't completely accurate since I had to cheat a bit to light up the interior in a predictable manner, but hopefully they s...

Wood

A small selection of procedural wood materials that I landed up crafting for the pool scene.

I wasn't quite sure what I wanted at the time, and for some reason it seemed like a good idea to try and cover most of the basics- so these were the end result. They're all kinda based around the same core node graph, but with enough modifications that they (hopefully) look somewhat unique.

Poolside WIP - 22/06/19

Another WIP of the poolside scene.

There's still some sampling issues that need to be fixed and I'm not entirely happy with how pristine the entire thing looks (I don't want it to look worn down, but I kinda feel like it needs something to show that it's a pool scene and there's more to it than what is strictly shown above).

Nevertheless, most of the major features are in place and I'm reasonably happy with how the texture randomization for the tiles and ceiling turned out. I shou...

Poolside scene lighting test

This looks and feels completely empty and lifeless, probably because it is.

There's only 3x downfiring IES lights on the ceiling at the moment, as well as an environmental HDRI providing the majority of the ambient lighting. Nevertheless, I guess all scenes have to start somewhere. The metal bits bolted to the walls are basically where the aforementioned buoys will be hung up.

Still lots of work to do before I can actually use the thing for some sequence work.

Buoy models

WIP screenshot of some wall decorations for the poolside scene I'm working on.

Originally I'd modeled up the left units, but they landed up being a bit too industrial/nautical given that they're typically bright orange and stuck out like a sore thumb in the scene. The ones on the right were later created to work around that since they're traditionally red and white or white and blue (likely the color combo I'll be using), and because of the way the rope works it's easier to pack them up...

Vanessa - Fwoomp

Unexpected fwoomping may lead to uplifting side effects.

This is kinda a render test for some "inflated" morphs I'll likely be using in an upcoming sequence. Unfortunately I still don't have the face rigging in place or the final body morphs, which means the swimsuit rigging isn't done either... So the only way I can really inflate this character ATM (without breaking absolutely everything) is to blow her up around the top of the swimsuit instead.

The eventual plan is to leverage ...

Procedurally generated flooring breakdown

Someone was asking about how I handle floors (of all things), so here goes nothing.

Long story short, I hate using tiled textures. They make sense for surfaces that actually have a tiled pattern to them, but for everything else I'm really not a fan (unless I have no choice due to time or money constraints). Instead, I prefer to model what I can and use randomly placed textures to handle the rest.

"But I thought you just said you hated using textures?"

Well, yeah. I hate usin...

Vanessa in Sequin (2/2)

Back side render of the same suit.

Originally the entire surface was covered in sequins, but then I kinda realized that would really suck to sit down in. The black fabric is a bit black, but I'm not sure what I can do about that without impacting the contrast of the sequins.

Anyways, yeah. More bubbly curves and swimsuit stuff.

Vanessa in Sequin (1/2)

Yeah, soooooooo...

This is pretty much where the previously mentioned sequin shader went.

This is also a newer version of my base character setup (which still isn't finished- insert head desk bashing here). I landed up redoing mostly all of the skin shaders, eye shaders, removed a ton of hair from the textures and turned it into real hair (namely the eyebrows and eyelashes), fixed some really stupid SSS issues, etc, etc.

The current goal is to actually use this iteration of ...

Poolside scene WIP

This is a rough WIP of a poolside scene I've been working on for a while now.

I've desperately wanted to do some sort of sequence work with Vanessa recently (mostly to test out the character rig, but also to just... produce something), but have thus far lacked the scenery to do anything reasonably reasonable.

This is an attempt to rectify that problem. It's still not quite complete as I need to finish up the chairs, model up a wall clock, halogen lamp (for the ceiling), and some s...

Sequin material study

Every so often I see something and go "I like that".

Other times I go "I want that".

While it should be pretty obvious what drives me forward in CG (I mean, I'm only really doing everything for one specific reason), I also like to try and push the limits every so often. More recently, I'd seen a fairly popular IG model wearing a sequin styled swimsuit, and both went "I like that" promptly followed by "I want that".

Thus began my quest to create a procedural sequin shader in ...

Growing Moutains animation test

This is so prototype I don't even know where to begin.

In fact, I wasn't even going to post this to Patreon initially, since it's nowhere near the level of quality I try and hold myself to (which I should probably note is constantly changing and evolving)... However, I figured it might make an interesting WIP piece since it's rare I do any sort of animation at all.

Anyways, I should probably note a few things:

• This was a random one-off animation test, nothing more, not...
  2019-06-09 05:25:25 +0000 UTC View Post

A completely boring text update - 19/05/2019

Sorry for the lack of updates and stuff.

Long story short, I'm still here, and still alive (though I suppose the whole "undead zombie" thing is still a possibility). I kinda got whacked with the flu late April which interacted with some previously unknown medical conditions and stuck around until early May. Around that point I tried to get back to work but either wasn't 100% yet or burned out- because everything was kinda dull and grey and really unappealing until suddenly it wasn't. 2019-05-19 13:02:38 +0000 UTC View Post

Carried Away (2/2)

And away we go off into the sunset.

Carried Away (1/2)

Man there's a lot of balloons in this picture...

WIP teaser of "Mirror Mirror" (2/2)

Rendered version of the aforementioned WIP scene (albeit at reduced at sample rate).

Yeah, I know it's feeling a bit empty- hence the whole "everything is subject to change" bit in the last post. It's in dire need of something to the left and right of the mirror, a better rug (instead of that fuzzy abomination currently slathered across the floor), and possibly some posters on the wall visible in the mirror. The balloons will likely be in a few of the poses as "comparison" props, though...

WIP teaser of "Mirror Mirror" (1/2)

Here's a WIP of something I've been working on for the past little while.

Initially this started out as an excuse to take the IK/FK body rig for a test drive before getting back to work on the face stuff, but someone it landed up turning into it's own little project in the process. Tube dresses are kinda one of those other things I really like, so I figured hey- why not give it a shot and see what happens. I'll likely be expanding this into a small image pack with multiple poses and rel...

Advanced character rig (8/???)

This was more of an experiment than anything else, since I'm not entirely sure if it was successful in the end.

A while ago I'd come up with the theory of driving facial bones directly via a kind of group/solo control scheme. The general idea was to scatter a bunch of controllers across the face, but have them setup in such a way that each controller could either move itself (and only itself) or intelligently manipulate those around it to simulate the general appearance of how facial mu...