STAR-LOG #02 A "wet" Project - Worklog

Hello Patrons

Since a couple of days I am working on a bigger art project which I wanted to do since I can remember when starting 3D all those years ago. It sounds a bit "rough" saying that but it's true, for all this time I really wanted to get a bit more creative when it comes to shader design which is a big part of my workflow and overall artist-being.

With the recent update of the engine I use to create my Artworks it is now finally possible to have more flexibility when it comes to creating new materials and textures. Speaking of that feature, it's called "3D Paint" - it allows you to literally "paint" overlays on the surface of your 3D model which then can be transformed into several material types. 

One of those material types which I have been working on over the years was "wet and sweaty" skin. We all know that skin in general is not easy to pull off and yet many game companies who also stepped into that direction recently doing mistakes since these kind of materials are pretty complex and need carefully adjusted in order to make it look natural.

However in still images you can be a bit more creative with that, which doesn't automatically mean it's "easy peasy" since I am not really a friend of heavy post production like photoshopping the heck out of everything - All I want is getting good results right within the engine.

Sometimes this is simply not possible, no matter how hard you try there's always something you need to adjust or simply add later in post production. This was also the case with my skin materials which had been tweaked to show wet and sweaty skin. In older version of the Engine it was simply not possible to have individual "wet spots" instead your "wetness texture" was spread all over the model which did look a bit off. It bothered me so much that I simply avoided to pull off such an art style.

Like I've written above it's now possible for me to overcome this limitation and use the new 3D paint feature which is a big step up from the older methods I've used to show wet skin. It requires time, more time and a lot of RAM (it seems like 32GB of RAM is barely the minimum for such applications these days).

Well so I got an idea to make simple test setup and boom - nothing was working... After installing the new Version of the Engine, all my materials and Textures I had created previously were gone... Only an "empty shell" was left with no contains. I was really upset about this since without these materials I've created, I couldn't make renders with my models anymore. That was a hard bummer but I didn't let it take me down and instead I re-made most of my materials again and this time I went one step further and started to improving them.

One of my first "test suspect" was well you might guessed it, Thor.  😅Since he was one of the last Characters I created artworks with, along with Cap I felt like starting with him was a good idea to get used to the new features of the engine.

After rebuilding his material, based on my own skin shader which I had used previously I noticed subtle changes according to the overall behavior of the shading and scattering. It looks less like "candle wax". Good Job Luxion for that part! But the "green seam lines" between the mesh parts aren't fixed in this version.. again.. it never seems to get fixed no matter what version will come to release *sigh*

Ok That pic up here is basically the first "pre render" done in KeyShot 11, with a little more adjustments and fine tuning I managed to make the shading looking a bit nicer which you can see here (ok I admit I used to photoshop this one but ONLY for removing the ugly seam lines)

Ok with those two done I went back to my usual plan and started my first attempt to create a wet skin material with the new tools. I am still learning how those new features can be utilized at their best so bare with me if something might not look like you expected it to look... xD 

Anyways "painting" on the 3D model felt a lot easier than arranging textures and using overlays. However I noticed that 3D painting also has some smaller "issues" which will hopefully get fixed with a future update. But so far I can say I really like this new feature.

With the hours passing by and me drawing more and more layers on the model, I tried different blending methods to achieve a watery like effect on that skin surface. It took a couple tries and serval hours of pre rendering them out but at the end of the day I was pretty stratified with the result.

Yet the lighting was a bit strong here and made everything look more like a Barbie doll, it was the first attempt so I went back to work and fixed the overall falloff which then looked a lot nicer.

Here you can see:

At This point I do not have any close ups of the fine and very detailed water drops and streaks which are running down on his body since my PC didn't really liked that idea too much and it's kinda sad to say that my i7 7700k slowly starts to show it's age when it comes to complex content like this.

Yet the "project" was kinda-"finished" but I wasn't really happy with it. I mean hey, I got it to work and now I can create wet overlays much more efficient but what about the character? Should he really just stand in the middle of nowhere? You know me... So that's why I decided to go in at full force and designed an interior which will be a suitable place for our nice and wet Thundergod. 😉

What couldn't be better than a nice shower place? Taking showers is nice but taking too much of them can make your skin dry so better take care of your skin ;)

With more work going into this project I wanted to take it a step further and using the same technique to create wet spots like I did on the Thor model above. Since when does a shower look dry when you just took one? This was the point I realized that I'm slowly running into CPU limitations. The more I added the slower it got and at some point it just crashed. Very disappointing...

Working with this slowly aging PC isn't quite as fun as it was back in 2017 when I build this computer for rendering purposes but a lot has changed since then. Software got more complex, video game models got more detailed and the hardware industry just keeps releasing newer hardware which can handle such workload more efficiently. As for my i7, I needed to make adjustments to the overall scene and it's lighting which is still a WIP btw but here I made a quick and ugly hand wirtend chart  which shows you basically the idea I had for this scene:

I used to created the outer right image first but that type of lighting quality was just too much for the CPU to handle (my GTX1060 isn't a big help either, it's slower than my i7 when rendering images like these) so I needed to go with a less heavy lighting solution which lead me into the picture on the far left - I managed to strip down the lighting quality in order to gain performance back but.. Yikes it looks so ugly I'd rather turn it off completely. However after another try I managed to get a more evenly looking ceiling light which doesn't take out the whole CPU and manages to look better than the one on the left. So I stayed with this lighting technique.

A few more tweaks here and there and voila:

I have to admit that I really like this ceiling light which gives the impression of modern in house LED lighting. I am still going to adjust some of the other materials in the scene and adding our Tundergod into the right spot since he's missing and actually the main purpose of this entire project.

So far I can say I'm pretty happy with all of the work and new learned things so far. My goal is to achieve good looking results directly in engine and this project up there is a pretty tough test for me and my skills - but mostly for my poor PC which has to render all of this. I would really like to push it even further but I can't go over the limits of my current computer.

Maybe in the future some things will change but I'll leave it for now. :)

As all of this said above the Scene is still a WIP and as soon I'll get the project to an end, the final images will be of course part of your monthly art pack releases.

Thank you for reading, if you have questions or suggestion's feel free to write a comment down below.

And as always have a nice day and stay healthy!

~F0