Friday Progress Update, Mar 8: "Partytime!"

Hello!

It's Friday again. Can't believe it, already? It feels like I wrote a progress update yesterday but the calendar doesn't lie. Let's get busy.

I'm finished with the party. Yup, you heard right. I'm done with all the remains of day 13. Which is the party and a few scenes before and after. In total 461 renders and 10 animations. Next I'm going to spend some time post-processing, coding, and all that stuff. After that the idea is to jump into the next day. I have a bit of script written for it and an idea where I think a good place to stop would be.

I could release the partynight as an update on its own. The size isn't bad. However, it's very branched and I think playing through it would probably be a bit too fast.

Preview to make sure everyone's awake.

... And it's a sleeping girl. Well, I guess everyone's not awake!

Anyway ... Continuing to where I think a good stopping point would on the other hand make the next update the biggest one so far. And the slowest. Got opinions on this? Let me know your thoughts. I'm down for giving way to group pressure!

Any questions this week?

Yes, but only two. So this should be fast!

Thermo: Ice Cream?

Yes.

Phew, halfway. Time for another picture.

So the second question is related to the picture above.

JJ: A long question about character creation, Beth and the Ice Cream Princess are mentioned.

Well. My workflow for character creation is basically this: I have written a script that calls for a character, so I know roughly what I want. I look around amongst the Daz3d characters for a face that looks like a good starting point, and some body (can be from a completely different character). Dial them in and do some test-renders to see if I like it.

I'm not good enough in something like zbrush to do real sculpting. Instead I'm dependent on morphs made by content creators. I'm in the same situation as most other other devs in this. Some people do morphs, us devs use these morphs to make our characters.

Anyway, once a face and body is selected, I try to find a good skin to go with them, and them tweak the characters from there. And this is where it can go terribly wrong. You mess around with all the shaping morphs until you think you got something. And then later, when you apply things like expressions, you can get odd results. Because the expressions were made for the base figure, not the one you're applying them to. A smile can look like a grin, or surprise can make a girl look like gollum.

For example, this is what I'm applying to Beth's chin alone (I get the irony in that the chin is mostly cropped in the picture above, don't think I don't!):

Shit I don't know why that's so big. It's only 260x427. Most shaping morphs are applied to three key areas: face, upper chest area, and of course the butt. While a significant part of all these morphs are probably an overkill, at least you end up with characters that are uniquely yours.

A much easier method to get unique characters is to just mix them. 80% of A, 30% of B, 10% of C. I'm just a sucker for fiddling with dials.

My hands are starting to crap from all the writing. I think we'll call it here. Feel free to ask me questions and I'll answer as best I can next Friday. 

See you next time, and thank you for your support!