About That HS2 Project...

Remember that HS2 project I mentioned before? Yeah I'm confident enough to reveal it since I've managed to tackle its multiple issues. So, the project is Jill Valentine from Resident Evil 3 Remake.

I told you it's gonna be popular character.

Now stop staring at her boobs for a moment and look up; see something weird? Yes, the eyebrows. Screenshot without upsampling look absolutely horrible, studio doesn't fare better. Actually they look better the more you zoom in but that's not practical solution in many scenes.

What's the problem? Well you see, the original model has very detailed eyebrows with individually modeled hair strand totaling at 5k vert count. Unlike  HS1 however there is no more separate mesh for eyebrows, AI/HS2 used (in my opinion) overly complicated method to make eyebrows separately adjustable/colorable. And so I have to wreck my brain thinking on how to make that brows work in HS2. Eventually I did, kinda proud of myself since (I think) this never attempted before in HS2 modding.

But as you see with the result, it's a waste of time. That extra 5k vertices added into the head is a performance penalty not worth keeping. I ended up doing the brows like my previous HS2 mods, flat painted brows though thankfully normal map gave the brows area a bit of definition.

Anyway this is how the 3D brows I used before look at its best

And here's the new, flat brows that look less like squiggly, hairy worms

And that's just one of many problems I found. I even haven't mentioned the asymmetrical face problem (same as Claire and Ada that I've worked on for HS1). Or the hair with 44k vertices. Yeah it's a heavy model. 

The project is now mostly cleanup and finishing touch but that's usually the parts where I stalled the most. I'm thinking to just do Amy the poll winner for HS1 in the meantime then back to Jill here later. We'll see.