Progress

Hey!

I'm back in good health, and have been working more on the hair simulations.

I ended up needing to redo Mio's hair basically from scratch as well (which means I'll need to redo Lila as well, but she won't be in the first batch of renders at least, so not a priority yet!). Both Mio's and Master's hair are now in a state that I've been able to start caching final simulations from some shots now, in preparation for rendering.

In case the word caching is unfamiliar, it basically means that the simulation calculations are saved into separate files, for later use, so the simulation remains the way it was when you were happy with it, for better or worse. Doing any changes would require redoing the affected caches, as the caches themselves aren't really malleable, in this case at least. Anyway, it's usually a necessary step for any animation. You do not want the simulations to not be cached, once you start doing final renders.

So, I'll be doing as much of that as I can up until end of the week, and then, after some final test rendering with the cached hair, and some double & triple checking, start rendering the finished parts on Tuesday/Wednesday. Or that's the plan anyway. So, the first batch should be rendering on Wednesday at the latest, barring any bigger surprises of course! But I'd like to think that I've bumped into everything bumpable at this point (fingers crossed!).

I'm always a bit nervous when I reach this stage, since it's kind of a "point of no return", when you can't do any massive changes anymore. I mean I can always re-render stuff, but that takes a ton of time, so usually not a great option, except with some minor stuff. But I need to commit to it eventually, or I'll be polishing this thing until the end of time!

I'll post more next week, hopefully with news about the first batch finally being in rendering!

Attached is some examples of Mio's hair sims. Master is hidden while I work on Mio's hair, so she's not shown here. I'm reasonably happy with the hair, other than that one behind shot, where it glitches a bit with the collisions happening with Mio's hand, but it's not too severe, so I might just leave it, if it seems too time consuming to fix. I'm a bit worried how the draping hair will affect Mio's look overall, as the way her hair frames her face in the non-simulated form obviously differs from the simulated form. I've of course tried to retain the framing as much as possible, but there's only so much you can do, if you want to avoid the hair coming off as too stiff. But I'm sure it'll be fine!

https://mega.nz/file/Kko2EbRY#SYfbP32B3y9nsXqk8lM1Zm7x0RaZVocIA3PC33cMWC0

Note that the lumpiness Mio has here, is due to this being the "clothes on" model of hers, only the clothes aren't in the scene, since they aren't needed for doing the hair simulations!