What to do next?

[AcetheSuperVillain]

Actually, I find the idea of a pheasant character intriguing. People don't give birds a lot of respect: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/M ... rnithology I like the idea of introducing people to different kinds of birds. Here's a quick little pheasant encounter for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTtVCNQXNbw Of course, the colorful pheasants are all male. Like with mallard ducks and peacocks and a lot of other birds, males are ornamented to attract females and the females are mostly camouflaged. Green Pheasants are actually the national bird of Japan.

But for the moment, I like idea of a stand-offish rival pilot character, which makes more sense for a bird of prey than a galliforme.

[Gidshiri]

If honestly, I should admit. I always thought that I'm not a real fan of furry. Not right fan. I mean, most of fans prefer "furry to furry" stuff. But i'm not. I've always like a lot more "human to furry" stuff. Exactly, male human to female furry. So, guys, now you can throw at me all shit that you have.
"Opened the umbrella and hid behind the wall"
I'm ready!

[AcetheSuperVillain]

Well, to each their own, but you're not likely to get man-x-furry from me. I sometimes get creeped out by human males, and part of why I like furry is that furry males don't creep me out as much.

So, as far as the process, I'm in another tough real-world situation. My retail job has changed the way my department works, so I was faced with the decision to accept a promotion (meaning more hours and more money) or lose my job, so obviously, I've accepted the promotion. Luckily, this has happened as I begin the last few courses of my 3D animation college degree. So there will be a short period where the combination of college of promotion are going to be a little too much to get any serious work done, but it will clear up in a couple of months. (Hopefully by August) My retail job is actually somewhat restful compared to making art and games, whereas the schoolwork tends to exhaust the same mental muscles, so my hope is that once school is finished the promotion is going to be less of an impediment than school+oldjob used to be.

Next thing I want to do will be a side-by-side comparison of state-machines (i.e. title->lobby->gameplay->result->etc) and accessing 3D cutscene files in both Unity and FlashDevelop with swc. I could do this as a just an experiment, or turn it into a little mini-game, like more Strip Pong, or another lemonade adventure.

[kvier]

Actually, I find the idea of a pheasant character intriguing.

♩ it ain't too fuckin' pleasant taking all your time pluckin' pheasant
no i ain't the pheasant plucker, i'm the pheasant plucker's son ♩

[AcetheSuperVillain]

Exhaaaaaaausted this week...

I can't wrap my head around any grandiose schemes at the moment, so I thought I would do some experiments. Blender3D has two rendering methods, Blender Render and Cycles. I'm very familiar with Blender Render, but Cycles is a new thing which is supposed to look more realistic, and it's closer to the Mental Ray renderer for Maya that I learned in school. So I wanted to do some experiments and see what I could get out of Cycles.

So here are some experiments I did to chip the surface a little. Click to enlarge.

The different versions are different ways that I could render skin textures.

#1 (Top Left) is Cycle's Toon Shader. Doing an actual cell shaded look is stupidly difficult to pull off with Cycles, but the Cycles Toon Shader can still do an interesting hand drawn sort of look to it. The lighting is different.
#2 (Top Right) is a multi-layered approach designed to approximate real-life skin. The hair is done with an Anisotropic Shader.
#3 (Bot Right) is the real-life skin, plus a cranked up "glossy" shader meant to look like wet or lubed up skin. This level of gloss is a bit extreme, something between #2 and #3 would be more ideal.
#4 (Bot Left) is the Velvet Shader, which is out of place on the shark, but might be how I do furry or feathery critters.

Let me know what you think.

EDIT: Oops, fixed the spritesheet a little

[AcetheSuperVillain]

Oh yeah, if you're curious to see the animation homework that is preventing me from pursuing my dreams, here you go: https://youtu.be/ZaDDdESH-t4

I'm not real happy with. I got a B- which is more or less the effort I put into it. It's annoying because my go-to style for this sort of animation is slow and practical, but the instructor keeps giving notes to make it more like Animaniacs, so I feel like I ended up with a bipolar frankenstein rhymth half-way through and then spend the second half smoothing things as best I can with a B- mindset. It helped when I realized that the original parameter was to make an 8-10 second animation, but the story I wanted to tell really needed more like 20-30 seconds, so in the end I compromised with 16.

[AcetheSuperVillain]

Shark Girl Pin-up
Toon Shader and then "Realistic" glossy shader.

So compared to last time, I've got her UV mapped and rigged, but I haven't done the ShapeKeys that allow her to have facial expressions. And there's no clothing, not that I'm complaining.

[Gidshiri]

Don't know why, but first one looks better for me. Second one is just too "shiny", maybe?

PS Not sure that this hair color suits her.

[AcetheSuperVillain]

BUTTER YOUR SPUDS, MATEY, MORE SHARKGIRL PINUPS, AHOY!!!


So, same story as before. I don't have time to make major progress on a new game, and I don't have the wherewithal to break it into bite size chunks. So instead, I want to practice working in 3D, which will also help me act more quickly and surely once I do have time to make games (2 more months til graduation, YARRRRRGH) I still haven't made the ShapeKeys to allow facial expressions, and there are a few other things I could fix, so maybe I'll fix them up and post this again.

I made the shark girl model, the environment is stuff from archive3D.net.

[AcetheSuperVillain]

Alright, so I've made a more complete pin-up set for this Cascade the Shark character on my NewGrounds and Patreon pages: http://acethesupervillain.newgrounds.com/art/ https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4787605

I have been given an offer to team up, on the condition that I meet a certain level of productivity. 2 new characters, 2 new ships and 2 new sex animations in 2 months, by the end of July. I'm honestly pretty excited to have a challenge put forth like that, and I'm eager to nail it.

He is also worried that my 3D creations, Pepper and Cascade, are not sexy enough, so if you have any ideas on what to do with that, please let me know.

[Gidshiri]

Not sure that i can say. I'm not really good with style ideas. The only thing that i noticed - i think, this hair style\hair color maybe not suit her. Ahhhh... don't know... -__-

And where i can see Pepper?

[AcetheSuperVillain]

Pepper is the character in the animation in the first post of this thread. The rabbit for Astro Vulpus.

As far as hair, it has been a problem for me to make hairstyles in 3D. So I like the style of Cascade's hair, but I'll be first to admit that it isn't exactly what I wanted it to be.

[Gidshiri]

I think she needs a slightly more "prickly" hair. For more "genki" look. Maybe even a little bit more aggressive. In the end, she is a shark, not a dolphin. (also I know that dolphins can be very aggressive, so it's just a stereotype... but you got that i mean, right?). But it's just my opinion. And maybe you can try dark blue and dark red colors for her hair?

[AcetheSuperVillain]

NEW STUFF,
NO EXPLANATIONS,

[Ungawa]

That is some serious hourglass figure with shiny hair...

[AcetheSuperVillain]

So it turns out the prospective partner did not like the kangaroo character I made, and since he was also not thrilled about making a scrolling shooter game, I figure it's better to just do things myself for now and not try to convince someone else that it's all going to work out fine everytime I make something new. There are types of games and characters that we could probably agree on, but I really want to get back to work on scrolling shooter porn and stand on my own two feet for the moment.

Which means, I'm back to the Unity plan. So I figure, I'll wait for school to finish (2 months) before getting serious about learning enough Unity to make it happen. I can dick around with making characters and animations until then so that my skills are up to snuff.



About having prickly, genki hair for Cascade, that's actually how I drew her in the first sketches, but in 3D that would mean a lot more geometry, which is harder to keep track of, which means it's harder to get it to look right. Little prickly things also wouldn't work if I decide to make Cascade available as a 3D print, which I probably will.

As for hourglass girl, she's supposed to be a kangaroo, small upperbody, long legs, so more of a pear shape, but I guess this one is still a bit broad in the shoulders and broad in the bunga zone, so maybe I'll work on that.

And fuck yeah, shiny hair. I covfefed the shit out that shit.

[AcetheSuperVillain]

Would you guys be weirded out if I made the 3 new girls are a kangaroo, goanna and kookaburra? One of them is definitely the kangaroo though.

[Gidshiri]

Do that you like, if you want so

[AcetheSuperVillain]

rigggggggged!

roo_test_rigged.jpg (101.47 KiB) Viewed 1845 times

There are a few things about the way this has been rigged that make me think I might want to go back and do it again. I might be able to fix it without a do-over though.

I feel like I've improved between Pepper-Cascade-KangarooGirl, which is another benefit to having this time of calm experimentation. That said, I need to stop and finish my homework for the week now. The critique for week one was basically "do everything over again". Mother Fucker.

[AcetheSuperVillain]

So, background technical stuff. I've been using a "new" rendering engine called Cycles, which is more realistic and closer to the Mental Ray architectural render I was taught to use in school. After fiddling through the shark pin-ups, I feel like I have more control over Cycles than I did with Blender Default and I get a better looking result.

Unfortunately, there is a catch. I did some tests and it looks like the default quality setting takes about 42 seconds for the frame above to render. If I were doing an animation, let's say 1m30s at 30fps, that's going to take over 30 hours to render, and not including any physics calculations, which the Pepper animation had. Meanwhile, if I really strip down the bare necessities, the old Blender Default can do the frame above in about 2.5 seconds, just under 2 hours. So, I'm afraid the pretty new Cycles renderer is not at all practical for animations, at least for now.