Inner Circle Update for December 27 2017!

Hey guys!

TK and I have been working overtime over the holiday and were pushing really hard to get this update posted the other day, but no bueno; there was simply too much to do ☹. Aside from that, it’s all good news :D. We have Neon’s Genesis 3 conversion working and it’s looking great. The other big thing is that we want to start the new year on a really strong note, and thus we will be trying very hard to have a basic battle test with the new art style ready for the January monthly update. More on both of these subjects below!

Neon Genesis 3 Conversion

We still have a pretty big laundry list of relatively minor fixes to make before we do the battle test portraits for the monthly update, as well as the final bend morphs, but Neon’s Genesis 3 version is working. Here are some of the major changes, as well as a gallery to show some of them visually:

Neon Genesis 3 Gallery

• Her body has been reshaped, but as opposed to Malise we kept this one quite similar to the old one. The geometry is a lot cleaner, so there should be fewer weird lumps (these didn’t stand out a lot with our old rendering style, but would be really obvious with the new one). 
• I improved her skin quite a bit by taking techniques I’ve learned while working on Malise (Malise also has some skin improvements I haven’t shown off yet). The biggest improvement is the addition of translucency and subsurface maps, which selectively block light from passing through to give the appearance of stuff like veins and imperfections; something important for making skin look more like skin and less like silicone or wax (or simply opaque).
• Like with our old Neon, she has a couple separate versions: one without her lower body armor and one with. One major difference is TK will be creating custom bend morphs for her thighs for each separate version so there aren’t deformities or overly bendy metal parts like with the last version.
• Neon’s now using the same upgraded genital system that Malise is using. It behaves a lot better on Neon, which is good (still need to make some fixes for extreme poses on Malise). I haven’t had any time to but I’ll likely differentiate their shape somehow to make them more unique.
• Slightly edited her face shape to fit the new style better, but left it very similar to the old one. She had a bit of a Battle Angel Alita thing going on with the bigger eyes and it was weirding me out. Genesis 3 has much lower polygon density on its base shape than Victoria 4 due to how it is made for high resolution morphs, and this means some details on her unique, pouty lip shape were lost. I may get TK to make a morph to fix that.
• TK and I have determined how we will do the displacement to bump conversion of her armor, but it will take TK more time to finish it. Aside from fixing the displacement artifacts mentioned in last week’s update, this is more to improve Iray’s performance and my sanity.

Volumetric Fog Testing

Ubercharge has been working on some initial testing with volumetric fog / area light beams / texture projection in Redshift, which reminded me I needed to figure out volumes in Iray for the Ven scene. Volumes are really useful not only for a standard fog effect, but also for darkness, which you see in this test render with the Corruptor. This’ll be useful for saving time with H scenes where a lot of shots from different angles are needed, but where we don’t necessarily have background environments. Depth of field can also look good, but I find a lot of artists cheese the hell out of it to avoid putting effort in. 

Battle Test Release

So, the plan is to have a very basic battle test ready in the next 10 days or so. It will be a very small release with the sole goal being to show off a working battle using the new art style. There unfortunately won’t be any H content, armor damage, or holds yet. I’ll be solidifying the artwork procedures as I go. Once it’s ready we should have a finalized battle background, animated sprites for the police enemy, at least one set of battle portraits for Neon and Malise, and if there’s time I’ll be trying my hand at some battle effects animations in Houdini.  I’m cracking the whip and making it a real goal for TK to have the displacement revamp for Neon’s armor done in the next week so that I can pump out her portrait set(s) without fighting Daz’s bug mentioned last week. 

We plan to build off of this battle test and continue to add in features up until we are finally ready to push v0.06 out the door.  Therefore, you can expect additional test releases at pretty regular intervals from here on out. Doing it this way will allow us to catch bugs as we go, and will also hopefully make the wait a little less painful while we work out the remaining stuff for the new artwork style (things like Malise’s 3D armor damage and the new ARIS scenes for instance).