colortwist

Vanessa - Too much buoyancy

This was really just an excuse to get her inverted and mess around with the hair. The styling still needs a lot of work (I'm still kinda figuring out how best to work those tools), but at least the dynamics work well enough to pull the hair straight down.

Vanessa was actually designed with inflation in mind (from a normal size up to this), so you'll likely see a lot more of her in this state in the future. I still need to finish up one or two other images, and then I gotta get back to work on ...

Vanessa - Up close and personal

Yeah... I think this one is pretty self explanatory.

Vanessa - Rear view

Yet another render of Vanessa, but from the back.

Vanessa - Side view

Another view of Vanessa from the side.

Vanessa - Does this swimsuit make my boobs look big?

Figured it was time to post something that actually resembles content for once.

So without further ado, here's Vanessa's backstory. She'll likely get tweaked and modified quite a bit going into the future, but she'll be one of a few different characters I'll likely be producing content with.

Character bio:

Vanessa is a 27 year old biochemical engineer who specializes in studying organic epidermal elasticity. She has a quirky and lighthearted personality, and often goes out of her w...

Character tests (2/2)

Followup to the previous post. The hair style didn't turn out at all like I was envisioning, since it's clipping together pretty badly and the layering doesn't look right at all... Nevertheless, it's marginally less embarrassing from this angle, so at least there's that.

Character tests (1/2)

Just messing around with shaders and trying to get a feel for how the SSS stuff works. Originally this picture was going to have hair, but it was so embarrassingly bad that I landed up turning it off before rendering.

Random code stuff

And now for something completely different.

I'm still here and working on stuff. Rather than making a text only post (which I swore to myself I'd never do), here's something only marginally better- a screenshot of the text only code I'm currently working on for this project (left side).

Long story short, I needed some nodes in the Xpresso graph editor that C4D doesn't implement by default for whatever reason. Most of it has to do with the way I wanted to rig up the hands on my model, but...

VR test render

This was just a quick test of the VR camera included with my rendering engine. It should be viewable through any application that supports the over/under format (like Whirlygig).

I'm not entirely sure if there's a demand for VR ready images like this, but they're fairly easy to produce, so it's probably something I'll be looking at doing occasionally in the future once I've got a full environment setup to render stuff in.

Character rigging (5/???)

Back view.

Something something dat ass? I dunno what the appropriate meme is these days.

Character rigging (4/???)

Just a quick test pose with everything enabled.

Still need to come up with a decent IK based control rig though, since rotating joints manually by hand is a huge pain in the ass.

Character rigging (3/???)

Oof.

Setting up a hundred or so corrective morphs is not fun, especially when the UI you're trying to do it through insists on restricting itself to a teeny tiny box that won't take up more than 10% of your screen.

Nevertheless, I think they're all done. Almost every single joint on this model has one or more corrective morphs associated with it for some arbitrary rotational range (ie, bend forward from 0° to 90°). There's also some subtle muscle flex morphs in there as well, which att...

Character rigging (2/???)

Finally finished painting the weights. Next up are the corrective morphs for the joint rotations and rudimentary muscle flexing.

Hair tests (1/???)

Just messing around with some hair. This is little more than a Hair object slapped onto a polygon selection cutting out the scalp, some dynamics to help the hair fall downwards, and a quick trim around the face.

Hopefully this system will be good enough to create some simple hair styles going forward. I kinda wanted to try and use simulated hair this time, since I wanted the hair to properly flow around the body and follow gravity in the event the character was bent over or posing at an obliqu...

Character rigging (1/???)

Finally started work on the character rig that I'm going to be using for the next little while. Most of the joint work is done, as are all the individual corrective morphs tied to the individual joint rotations.

Still haven't finished the cloth shading stuff, but I kinda got tired of testing that stuff out on a character with no textures or rigging. I'll likely return to that after I have everything setup enough that I can actually start fiddling around with posing and modeling up a proper env...

Experiments in cloth shading (7/7)

Third render test of the cloth shader with texture support, with yet another fabric pattern.

Experiments in cloth shading (6/7)

Second render test of the cloth shader with texture support, but this time with another fabric pattern.

Experiments in cloth shading (5/7)

Finally got texture lookups working on the cloth shader.

There's still a lot of things wrong with the shader, but it seems like more things are working than not, which I guess is one way to measure progress...

Experiments in cloth shading (4/7)

Success!

At this point, the shader appears to be working reasonably well. It still doesn't support AOVs (for splitting up the diffuse/specular reflections) and a whole bunch of UI related things are hardcoded when they really shouldn't be, but the core BxDF code seems to be working well enough.

It's probably worth mentioning that the swimsuit itself has no texture images assigned to it. The fabric effect is strictly created at render time via the cloth shader, so the entire setup consume...

Experiments in cloth shading (3/7)

Almost working, but not quite.

This one had a few more issues with the way wi and wo were supposed to be oriented, causing the same issue as the previous picture, but to a much lesser extent. This render was using a different weave pattern as well, creating the illusion of a different kind of fabric (despite the same diffuse color).

Experiments in cloth shading (2/7)

Progress in shader land.

Okay, maybe not. I didn't realize it at the time, but a whole bunch of normal calculations were reversed (or rather, the algorithms I was trying to use expected things pointing in the other direction). This is partially why the interior of the fabric geometry is visible from the outside, which clearly shouldn't be possible if the surface of the fabric was actually opaque (which it should have been).

Nevertheless, this lead to a really bizarre satin-like effect th...

Experiments in cloth shading (1/7)

After my last attempt at generating fabric textures fell apart, I decided to change gears and try something else. I've been aware of a nifty cloth shader drifting around the internet for quite some time, though finding support for it in most renderers is fairly rare (probably because it requires the use of external definition files that describe the weave pattern in plain text).

Unfortunately the renderer I'm currently using didn't come with support for this particular shader OOTB, so I set ou...

Fabric texture study (5/5)

Here's what that model looks like close up. Note that the fabric textures only contain a group of 25x11 stitches, of which there are clearly more than that in the finished render. There are actually 8 different sets of 7 textures per fabric "patch" (consisting of AO, depth, falloff, alpha, weave_id, normals, and stitch_id textures), all of which are randomly tiled across the surface of the geometry in an attempt to reduce or eliminate any tiling artifacts.

Fabric texture study (4/5)

Here's the result of that system when applied to the swimsuit model I'd previously created. The results weren't too bad, apart from the subtle tiling artifacts still visible along the border of each fabric patch. In this case, the aforementioned fabric textures were randomly tiled across the surface of the swimsuit approximately 80 times along U and V.

Fabric texture study (3/5)

These are all the textures that the aforementioned system was capable of rendering out (apart from the diffuse texture, which was was used to define the "dye" or color of the fabric). Each set of textures was designed to seamlessly tile with itself and any others so long as they all shared the same master border seed. This is most evident on the stitch ID AOV, where you can actually see the colors of the bordering stitches line up with themselves across the X and Y axis.

Fabric texture study (2/5)

Here's a view of the same scene, but rendered out from an angle (normally this scene would be rendered out from the top down using a parallel/orthographic camera). In this case I've overridden the shader to show the ambient occlusion output from the scene.

Fabric texture study (1/5)

One of the problems I predicted I might have with this project has to do with the subject of fabric texturing. Early on I knew that I would need to figure out a system for generating high resolution fabric textures, yet this would also need to be done in such a way that I could create new patterns on demand without spending too much time doing so.

This was one of the systems that I'd come up with. The general idea was to leverage the hair system inside C4D to create a configurable "stitch" obj...

Muffin top (4/4)

Back side of the muffin top model. Sorry about the noise, this one was rendered while I was in a rush so I had the camera samples turned all the way down.

Muffin top (3/4)

A somewhat creepy untextured render of the model with the muffin top breasts.

Muffin top (2/4)

Rear view. I can't quite remember, but I think this was the first model where the boobs were actually meshed into the body as a single contiguous (albeit extremely inflated) surface.