About 3D rendering

Hello everyone,

This is my SECOND run of that post since Fanbox decided to bug during my previous post erasing EVERYTHING I had written so I'm slightly salty :x

If you don't mind, I really don't feel like rewriting everything I had written before and I'll just introduce this post saying that I want to show you how I'm trying to make my renders better in TH2 compared to the first game.

First Pic

Sorry, due to Fanbox being rather low-end in terms of possibilities, I can't embed a pic like that. You have to open it in another tab.

So, in the two comparisons I'm going to show you, the left pic is the original rendering and the right pic is the final pic.

In that first pic there are two elements where you can see big differences: Halcyon and the lighting. Let starts by the easiest part: the lighting. The improvement of pics are not always necessarily done through the 3D part. In that particular case, EVERYTHING is done through Photoshop (unlike the next pic.) I take the opportunity of knowing enough of Photoshop to add a more luminous side on Kaya's back (because it's closer of the edge) and a darker part on the right. It's also a great way to make it a bit "dual" with Kaya in the light and Halcyon in the dark (okay, that's common as fuck but hey, at least it's coherent :p)

What required most of the work is Halcyon, though. What you don't see here is that I didn't need 2 renders to reach that result. If I take the left render, it's enough to add light, but if I want to add stuff properly on Halcyon, I'd have to make sure all the effects aren't impacted on the grating. It's possible with the selection tool and a LOT of patience but I'm not sure the result would be convincing. So to be able to add whatever effect I want on Halcyon, I have to have her model alone so I can use it as a single layer after. Which means making a render just for that. And I ALSO need a render without her so I can add her below the main layer. So as you can see, just for that one pic, I had to make 3 renders. Of course, I invested in a great GPU last year just for The Hunter so it's not a problem. Those renders are 5-6 minutes. I just want to explain that having a single final pic doesn't mean there was a single render in the process (it'll be even more evident with the second pic.)

Anyway, once I had everything I wanted, with my Halcyon layer being unique and behind the grating, I could apply everything I wanted on her. So I darkened most of her edges so that she looks wrapped in darkness and it was also easy to add a detail that you might not see at that resolution but you'll see in game: I added the shadows of the gratting over her body. I know that most of the players won't care but that's the kind of thing I wanted to do. It doesn't make my renders miraculously awesome, but at least I hope they're slightly better than in the first game. Now let's move to the second pic.

Second Pic

There's much more to say about that one. First of all, the left pic is more or less what you'd have in the first game. YES, the dog had fur but 1) A render with him took between 1h30 and 2h 2) A single file with its fur on was between 150Mb and 200 Mb (meaning that if I combined all the scenes where he appears (knowing that I usually save one file per pic), just his scenes alone were taking easily 3 or 4 Gb of data.)

Since I started with the fur, let's talk about it. Rendering-wise, it's still long. Of course it depends on your distance, but since most pics I rendered for that scene are close-ups, it's long. To give you an idea, even with my RTX 2080, those renders are between 40 and 50 minutes each. However this fur isn't rendered through an add-on like the previous one was. It's the fur prop delivered with Daz's new Dog 8 model. As such it looks much more natural. I had to tweak it for several hours cause some parts of the fur didn't please me (especially on the head), but the good thing is that once it's fixed, you can it as an asset and load it properly everytime. The other great improvement is that a file saved WITH a dog and its fur is no longer huge as fuck. As an example, most files for that scene (which contains 2 characters, fur and some props) are 4Mb, which is MUCH more bearable space-wise. So yes, adding the fur was the first thing. However keep in mind that overall, this fur is MEANT for German Shepherds. Because they have long hair. For short-hair dogs (labradors, great danes etc...) it's still the no-fur version and it still looks rather meh ^^'

Next, let's move to something I worked a lot on (I actually "researched" it so much that when I reached the level of that pic, I decided to re-render previous pics to add the effects I had discovered): The penis. Once again, excuse the size, it'll be clearer in the game's resolution. There are two major elements that were added between the base render and the better render (and this time, it's not Photoshoped, it's stuff worked on pre-rendering. The most evident one is the shiny look. It maybe sounds stupid when said out loud, but I never really looked into shininess in my renders. The only occasion I made that effort in the first game was during Jeanette's Bath scene and I had used a pre-made tool without understanding how it worked. Except that this time, I decided to take the time to understand how shininess worked.

You know, there's something I dislike in many 3D renders, it's that "oily" effect bodies have. The skin is ubber shiny and they wouldn't even shine that much if they were coming out of a pool. Personally, it's not my cup of tea. Some 3D models in Daz are actually delivered directly with that shininess and I hate it. Skins are NOT shiny. They are under certain circumstances. That's why none of my characters have that shininess.

BUT, as I just said, it's a question of circumstances. And if something is MEANT to be shiny because it's wet, then it's important to add that shininess to make it LOOK wet. And that's exactly what I wanted to add in terms of "improvement" for my pics. And after a good amount of hours of researches, I ended up finding the best way to make something look wet. Of course depending on the element, values have to be tweaked, but at least, now it looks better. If you scroll between the two penises version, I'm sure none of you will think that the left one is better.

There's also a slight element I added in the render but that is me overlooking it in the first game (I could've added it easily, just forgot), it's the bumping. In 3D texturing, bumping is a technique used to "simulate" depth only trough 2D material. Of course it won't work if you need to simulate a close-up pit of several meters, but it's perfect for "small" variations of height. In that case, there's a bump file for the veins. Once again, it doesn't show much due to the size of the pic, but they actually look like they're "over" the cock, which gives a much more "organic" render. In a single word, now it looks much more like a dog penis :p

And I'll finish with Kaya. Once again, it was all about shininess and wet simulation. Here, you can see two places where there's wet simulation: her nose and her hand. Her hand is logical cause you'd guess she'd pull out the dick out of the sheath herself, making her hand understandably wet. For the nose, it's simple, she takes a gush of pre-cum on the face right before. And as such, her face will keep the wetness through the scene depending on what part was exposed to possible wetness. Not only does it increases the realism, but it also makes thing more coherent (and by extension, more exciting, I hope ^^')

One last thing you can't see is that applying shiniess on a body means applying it to ALL the part of a body. For instance, it's impossible to ask for the nose only to be wet-looking. It has to be the whole head. Which means that once again I have to do different renders to reach the right pic you're seeing. To give you an idea, that scene is 12 pics in total. Even if I made some that were unusable in the end, I still created 29 renders for that scene. 29 x 45 minutes = 1305 minutes = 21 hours of rendering just for that scene. Thankfully, my PC is fully operational while I render so it's not time lost. But still, it shows the amount of rendering I invested for that single scene. In that case, I'm taking the extreme though. Other renders don't take that long, don't worry. But that will explain why the updates will have overall less images per update than in the first game: because I prefer using a part of the development time to finetune them.

And that's all. That post is huge as fuck, I didn't expect to write something that long (took me a whole hour to write it all (not counting the 15 minutes I lost in the previous version's intro :x))

After that there will be one last post to show the remaining elements of the game I haven't presented yet and after that hopefully, the game will be release ;)

See ya o/