Making good use of post-production

Hello everyone,

I'm making this post cause I thought it's interesting to mention different things about post-production.

As you know I mentionned at some point my wish to compensate the lack of professionalism in my renders by trying to improve them a bit through Photoshop when I deemed it useful. One of the result was, for example, the scene where Kaya jerks off the dog in the cemetary (taken out of context that sentence would work like a charm with your friends 8D). Back then, I simulated Kaya's hand to be slippery because the dog's dick was thanks to Photoshoping. It's more work (not only because there's extra work on Photoshop but also because most of the time, you need to make two renders instead of a single one) but as I've always said about TH2, I prefer less scenes with more pics in each and more crafted pics.

Anyway, the patrons of the upcoming post for the +$25 tiers will be able to see that soon.

At some point though, I started thinking about something: "If Photoshop is such a wonderful tool, why wouldn't I extend the possibilities?" And I started thinking about ways to make good use of Photoshop into the improvement of the renders. The concept of mixing two renders to have the effect applied on only a single part of the body was already good itself. There was a catch, though: It works easily for a whole hand. I simply have to erase the rest. Even a noob like me can do it easily. But what about something more complex? Something that had to follow a certain shape and needed some real skills to make? I could take a random example but might as well show you directly what was done. While there are other possibilities, the first thing that came to mind to me was smegma.

In The Hunter, I didn't bother much to represent smegma. I took the UV file of the dick (so the "skin" file) opened it in Photoshop, sloppily added a brush with a "fitting" look (as close to reality as I thought it'd be) and then saved it as a new file. That trick was good enough to me and I even used it for other stuff. In the end, Jeanette's zombie smegma was done that way and Paige's shitty cock (when fucking Akane) was also done that way.

But ever since I upped everything in TH2 (read: "chose more recent technology for the 3D models"), it's been itching me to try new possibilities as Daz created new way to add textures in the meantime. So I threw myself in the challenge. The goal would be to make a good-looking cheesy cock. First of all. We need a dick (it's censored because Fanbox, but don't worry, it won't be in the game.)

- Hello, Dick!

- Hi, there!

- Feeling good?

- Plain healthy as you can see!

- Great!

The challenge then was to find a texture that was close enough to smegma. Of course, you can easily imagine that such a thing doesn't exist at all. It's already hard enough to find more "common" stuff like pee or feces. So I had to play it smart. After browsing different stuff, I fell on something that could do the trick: foam. With the right tweaking it might work. So I bought a foam pack and started tweaking stuff. After several hours spent making multiple tests, I had to give up. Not because the foam looked bad, but because it was impossible to have it on a precise spot. No matter what I tweaked, there were either too much in the shaft (and by too much I mean, almost all along it), or (and that's what happened the most), it didn't go smoothly around the glans. My first reflex was to seek for another pack of foam. But I quickly changed my mind and tried another texture pack I had around (that had nothing to do with possible smegma look), just to see if the problem was the foam itself or the way the penis UV is built. And unfortunately, it's more a problem of UV (meaning that no matter the tweakings, I won't be able to do exactly what I want.)

That's where my photoshop post-prod came back in mind. If there's TOO much, I can remove the unnecessary part on Photoshop! But hey. This is isn't sweat, here. Smegma has to follow a certain "shape" to be credible. Maybe I could've spent enough time to learn to make it good. But that would've made things EVEN longer. And that's when I got blessed by Slaneesh: "If only I had someone around me able to craft smegma properly through a soft!" "If only...someone..." "If only..." (I'm simulating the echo.)

"AH! But I DO have someone!"

*Knock* *Knock*

- Yeah?

- Peak? Got a sec?

- Sure.

- So here's a dick. Say hello, Dick.

- Hello, Dick.

- And here's a second dick.

- What's that?

- It's soap.

- I want you to blend those two pics so that only bits of the soapy version remains on the clean version to simulate smegma.

- ...

- What?

- Uh? Nothing, it's done.

- Already? But I...

- Got something else to ask?

- N-No...

*Walks away with his fucking Guts theme looping for the next 5 years*

And that's how we're reaching something much more convincing than with TH! (The censor kills things a bit, but believe me :x)

So whenever I'll need smegma in my game, thanks to the power of painting AND having an artist able to do it, I'll be able to choose quantity, shape and color 8D

And I've written WAAAAAAAAAY too much just to show you that, so I'll be 10 times more brief for the second thing.

The other thing I was wondering if it could work nicely with asking Peak to try it is reflection. The example here is very small but that's because I don't want to spoil the pic. However you'll easily get the idea.

This is supposed to be something "slimy". Daz technology allows me to craft its shape thanks to gravity and it works very well. The counter part is that in terms of light reflection, it sucks (at least on my side cause there are no other lights than the camera auto-lamp.) BUT, with a couple of well-placed lines by Peak:

It now looks REALLY slimy :D So once again, when it's needed, I might request Peak to make those small tweakings on some renders to improve their quality overall.

I didn't plan that post to be that long, sorry ^^'

I'll release the +$25 first post with the first set of images + the title screen versions tomorrow. And I'll come back around the end of the week to show you more about the brothel.

See ya! o/