Perv's Diary: Week 40

Hey there folks! For this diary we're gonna have a further look into my new rendering set up. This one though, will be focused on ported models.

This diary is gonna be pretty much all technical mumbo jumbo again! So in case you're not interested, here's the basics:

I've finished the porting of three new characters, all are now ready on my new set up, just waiting to join the action!

These characters are: WidowMaker, Jill Valentine and Yorha 2B!

WidowMaker will of course be featured on our upcoming patreon project! But since Jill was always at least on the top three of every pool I made, I decided to get her ready as well for future projects! We'll have pools on that soon!

As for Yorha 2B, she'll be featured on a high tier patron request!

Ok now for the mumbo jumbo!

Since I started making these animations I've been struggling to achieve a proper balance for shading character skin. Shaders are responsible for simulating a surface material of any kind. Wether you want a reflective mirror, a glowly object or a shiny metal. These properties are achieve through the shader, more complex the shader is, more effects it allows.

Notice for example how current gen games have much more organic looking characters than past gen games.  It's because now developers uses more complex shaders, that allow for example to mimic the natural oils of skin, the "wet shiny" look of a characters lips and so on.

In my case, finding a proper shader for skin was always a struggle because using the most advanced method, which even includes subsurface scaterring(which is essentialy simutaling the natural red tone of human skin, due to the blood underneath the skin) would completely explode my render times.  So I've been always trying to find a realistic but yet very optimized way of making a shader skin.

After a lot of failed attempts I've finally arrived at a more promising result, which can be seen on these new ports I made. The main difference between these tests and my past work is that now I have a shader properly simulating the skin oils instead of the fake shiny effect I used to give a more organic feel to the skin.

 The "wet shiny" effect is something that I still intend to use, but now only on the proper moments, to mimic sweat or a bathing scene for example. Which will now work on top of this new shader.

But even after arriving at this more realistic, but very optimized shader set up I built,  I also felt the need to increase the complexity of lightning on my scenes, so the shader can better react to the enviroment.  This was also a hard task to work on without exploding my render time. My current idea is to make a kind of a light trick, where I have my set up calculating  the emission and shadows of a few lights. While I have multiple lights emitting light information that is only picked by the shader and ignored by the actual light calculation on the scene. I'm still improving on this trick, but I did manage to use it very well on these previews I'm sharing.

That's all for now folks, I decided to upload the images in .rar this time, since it's quite a handful. For the next diaries I intend to talk about the next thing I want to upgrade on my animations. Which is the quality of my facial animations, my current attempts to start including proper dialogue and lip sync. It's gonna be very fun and challeging!

Thank and keep rocking!