#79 - big foot orc (remastered) (first part)

The first part of this remastering is complete, and will be sent to my Big Supporters soon. However, please note that this remastering will be limited to 1440p resolution, in accordance to the terms I've set with the commissioner for the original project. Also, this remastering will only cover the commissioner's version and feature his characters, and won't include ak0's Orc and the other Goblin.

This'll be a long commentary; brace yourselves.

So we all love Mr. Hornyfang, right? As soon as I finished giving him the new Hairyfang updates, I knew right away that I wanted to start remastering any older projects that I had with him. Because I feel like most of my projects and quickies featuring him have been pretty good hits so far, and they could only be made better with his improved model being surgically inserted back into the scene (more on this later). And of course because the commissioner is a friend, I don't mind going out of my way for him, pro bon[er].

I actually wanted to remaster #85 - hotdoggin hornyfang first, as it is the newest project with Mr. Hornyfang's previous body, and the project only had four different scenes so in theory it should've been quick. Unfortunately for me, I did a lot of heavy post-processing to get the look that I wanted in #85, and much of that work would be completely incompatible with a new model being rendered out.

With #85 being out of the question (for now), I then went back to the original #79 - big foot orc, the first project featuring Mr. Hornyfang. Now it's been several years so this might be a little off, but I think I remember the commissioner specifically requesting a few things about Mr. Hornyfang's appearance. SL was still several months away, but all of the new customizations for Orcs were already revealed, and the commissioner had already redesigned Mr. Hornyfang to account for those new options. He wanted the new warpaints for instance, but I didn't have access to them yet so that couldn't be done. He also requested Mr. Hornyfang be chubby, but the Orc model I was using lacked a true chubby/fat morph, so the best I could do was give him a mild musclegut. I don't think he requested a hairy body (though I knew he liked them), which is why the version with ak0's Orc instead had the hairy textures as a contrasting feature.

But anyways, I was definitely unable to faithfully represent Mr. Hornyfang's appearance as the commissioner intended (he was fine with that), which was certainly a little disappointing to me. Now I have an opportunity to finally make it right, and boy did I. 

There's not one, but *two* versions of Mr. Hornyfang to enjoy this time around. There's the new hairy and chubby Mr. Hornyfang, which is a more faithful representation of the commissioner's vision of the character. But there's also a slightly leaner musclegut and smooth version of Mr. Hornyfang as well, which is intended to be more of a modernization of the original commission. It's the best of both worlds as far as I'm concerned.

The commissioner's Goblin has remained mostly the same for this remastering, other than also modernizing his appearance and slightly tweaking his textures.

You may remember that I'm kinda scarred by my previous attempts at remaking older projects (I think they all look inferior to the originals). So with that in mind, I approached this remastering very conservatively. I ended up reusing almost the exact same frames and lighting as the original version, with minor tweaks here and there. There wasn't anything fundamentally wrong with the original #79 imo, so there was no reason to drastically rethink anything that I did then.

And as I've stated before, this wasn't just a simple model swap. I had to very carefully reinsert Hornyfang's updated model into the scene and completely repose him while trying to maintain visual fidelity with the original version. He also required a lot of bespoke morphs to make sure that he looked excellent for each shot. And for this first part at least, it was a success. There's one shot with slightly more tweaks to the pose (1_OrcSolo), and I imagine a few later shots will be problematic w/o further tweaking. The Goblin's pose has been left untouched.

There's also a lot of subtle changes to the overall image. It's too technically esoteric to get into, but they are there. Try comparing these images vs. the original versions to see what differences you notice.

Regarding those scrapped images, I made them for fun + testing purposes. They're obviously incomplete, but I think with some added work they could certainly work as part of a new project or quickie. Particularly the one with the Humans, which is actually a fairly old idea + pose. Yeah they're not really related to this project at all, but I might as well share them now! Just sowing some seeds for the future.