Motherfucking Nighttime

I wanted to give you all one final teaser post as I race to finish the Julie update. As before, this is just a sleeping bag variant of the actual animations I made that I'll be using in the next update.

There are a few fancy things I'm experimenting with here.

First, the skin is being just slightly shaded to look a little more 3D. It's very subtle, but it added a certain depth to the breasts that I felt greatly improved the quality. It's most noticeable on the clavicles.

Second, I used invisible floating circles to partially hide the outlines along the bottom of the breasts, because the topology around that area on the mesh is a fucking nightmare and I like how it looks this way.

Finally, on the second animation in particular, I made my very first animation featuring sweat! I always composite the sweat on in Gimp after rendering, which would be completely impractical to do with an animation. This left me with two options:

1. Edit the skin texture to have sweat on it.

2. Do what I did instead.

I didn't want to edit the skin textures to have sweat because the shaders do a lot of color-alteration on the texture to yield the end result, and those processes would be applied to the sweat as well. I also wanted very easy control over the placement of the sweat droplets.

So instead, I created image planes with little pictures of beads of sweat I drew, like so:

Then, I did a pretty nifty little trick known as vertex parenting, where I parented each image plane to a nearby vertex on Julie's mesh (meaning, if that vertex moves, then the sweat drop moves with it). This allowed them to each individually match the animation as needed (for example, the sweat on the top of her breasts needs to move a lot more than the sweat on her face).

I ALSO tried out this technique with a cleavage image plane I made, which you can see in the daytime image above. I originally included that cleavage in the animation, but you're gonna have to trust me when I say that this just looks better.
However, I still used it on the next animation I just finished making, which I'll just let you see in LLRR proper.

Which will be soon. I fucking hope.