Bayman's Spotlight W.I.P

Hello Patrons

Here I'd like to show you my current project with this character from Dead or Alive 6. Bayman is actually one of my favorite Characters out of this franchise (even when I'm too dumb to actually play him in the right way... xD) so I thought that he deserves a little more love since that game is actually all about the girls.

Nothing wrong with that since I like a lot of these characters (Kokoro and Hitomi <3) but sadly the guys don't get much spotlight which is kinda a bummer in my eyes. So much potential goes to waste - what a shame.

But don't worry I'm here to balance it out a bit ;) - by speaking of balance did you actually know that Bayman is one of the first characters which was created for the games franchise? He's been along since DOA1 which was released on Arcade back in 1996 and later ported to the PS1 and Sega Saturn around 1997 - 1998.

Anyways back to technical state of this image set:

The scenery I've used for this Shoot is the beloved stage from DOAX2 which was released exclusively on the XBOX360 back in 2006. It is a very huge model which uses over 200+ materials for all objects. That's quite some work I can tell you... :D

So starting back in 2019 when I was working on this photo shooting of Diego -> "click" I spend around a whole week to create the materials for the environment. In all the circumstances I tried to achieve the "best" possible look without frying my PC. Since this Model is very huge it pushes my CPU a lot to render this with advanced lighting effects.

So rendering the main scene with good quality forced me to do some "cuts" which I really don't like to do. But hardware limitations can't be easily wiped away like it's nothing... ^^

The water shader I've created for the Diego image set came a bit "short" and I was not very happy about it. Since I'm re-using the same environment again for my current project with Bayman, I came to the decision to revamp some of the materials in the scene to give them a nice polish.

In depth I reworked a lot of materials in their specularity and reflectivity behavior to give them a bit more natural look. The main goal however was to create a new water shader which looks better than my first attempt but this time without melting my PC. After playing some games which have good water shading for their time (such as Super Mario Sunshine for example) I took a deeper look in their tech and how this was archived.

For my first attempt I tried to use some different layers of alpha blending for the surface - which didn't looked bad but required a higher sample count to calculate light rays underneath the water surface. It unfortunately killed my CPU with all it's power so I had to scrap that idea.

My second attempt was a completely different approach - from what I've learned so far about shading and texture mapping when it comes to video games and their models, I collected all this info and tried to create a new shader material which suits my requirements. The exact process is more complicated to explain but I give you a little hint about it: "Independent Textures" <- That's the main key about it.

Alright without writing an even longer story about it let me show you my results.

here's my first attempt on the Diego picture from 2019:

The image up here has been post processed so the colors are a touch brighter.

Now let me show you my current result with my new shader material:

take notes that the color adjustment is still WIP.

Isn't that quite a difference huh? I'm pretty happy how it turned out. I also made some shots from the environment testing various shaders in different lighting conditions, take a look:

I really like the sunset version of this stage, it really makes want to jump into my screen just to be at that place. I might get used to this version for a future project but until then we'll see.

Anyways about Bayman up in the first image - he's a bit... Well he looks like a "ken doll" at the moment but don't worry he'll be equipped with swim shorts and the "ding dong schlong" of course. ;)

Alright folks that's it for now I hope you all look forward to the final image set which will be included in your future Art packs.

Have a nice day and stay healthy.

~F0