Fixing Shannon's Damn Hair - Or why things take forever

Hello, Patrons and Public! As promised, tonight I wanted to go through part of the development process with you, to explain why things sometimes take forever.

The image above is one of the first renders you'll see in 0.5v2. One of the first things I do when creating a new update, after I plan the update, is creating the styles for the girls. Since 0.5v2 is a continuation of 0.5v1, this was mostly already complete for me - at least for the daytime style. I create files like this, which is called char_shannon_ep5_day.

To create the original scene with Shannon, I load up the living room - and sometimes I have to rebuild the old sets because I set them to low texture for my old video cards. Then I load up Shannon and I pose her. Then the time consuming part is playing with the lights until I get the render that I want. The actual rendering time takes 5-7 minutes (the 3090 is sooo nice!). The set up to get to that rendering time can easily take an hour or more, but I generally get at least a few renders out of each scene setup.

However! If you look closely at that top render, there are a couple problems. These are problems I don't really notice until the end of the project when I look closely at the renders to make sure they're ok.

First is a white box on the top left. That's the plane adding light to the scene reflecting off the window. That can be fixed in post easily enough, but since there are other problems I just went ahead and moved that light upward so it doesn't reflect.

My main problem with the render is Shannon's hair. Her tails are stiff as a board and the right one clips into her shoulder and also the couch. I don't know that that's a big deal to a lot of people, but to me once I notice it that's all I can see in that render. It has to be fixed.

The solution? Dforce! Dforce is a part of Daz3D that allows us to use physics. You'll see it in clothes, blankets, as well as hair.

Luckily, I have access to a really cool guy named wibble, who is my Discord admin and a hell of creator in his own right. He was able to take Shannon's hairstyle and make it a Dforce asset.

So I applied the Dforce hair to Shannon and ran the simulation for the physics. After about 16 minutes, this was the result.

You can see how the hair falls mostly naturally, and, most importantly, it no longer clips into the couch and shoulder. But Dforce is an imprecise physics engine, to be sure. It often gets screwed up, especially when it's in tight little spots like under an arm. And so there's that weird loop just under her left armpit.

To fix it, I manually adjusted her tails outward and ran another Dforce simulation - and another 16ish minutes later, I got this:

It's not perfect. It's still a little weird. But it's not totally unnatural and it doesn't dominate the image once you've seen it. You'll also notice the light reflection is no longer on the window.

Now I still have to render the background and resize the image from 4k to 1080p, and denoise it as well. Then I have to convert it to webp and it'll be ready for the update.

This one image, when all is said and done, will probably take 3 hours to complete. They're not all like that. A lot of images I can do quickly once I set up the scene. But every few renders does require some special treatment, and can take significant time, even with a 3090 doing the rendering. In fact, the actual rendering part might just be the fastest!

I don't intend this to be a "woe is me" kind of post. It's a process I actually enjoy, and I'm sure at least some of my time is mismanaged. But I did want to explain to you guys what goes on a little behind the scenes and why I suck so bad at predicting when I'll complete a project.

As I mentioned, I will be changing things up in the next release and should be far more reliable with my updates.

Thank you for attending my TED talk and have a wonderful weekend!

-CarbonBlue