tchaikovsky2
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Month of boredom: bendy doggo WIP 05
🕑 Added 2017-09-22 19:53:20 +0000 UTC So after a few more days of working on that other thing (which is now rendered and like 40% processed), I decided to get back to this pic.First I'll show you what a huge difference a shader and displacement can make (other than the obvious visual one), so here's what we had last time, without displacement:
And here it is with displacement, shaders, and LOOK I FINALLY ADDED EYES because I'm pretty sure I won't have to move the head anymore.
Note how it now takes like 3 more minutes to render (this is also why I didn't assign the skin shader sooner - to speed up the previews of other things). XD
A skin shader has two reflection layers, and they're both glossy (blurry). Glossy reflections can be very slow to render. In this entire scene, I have set the sampling quality on all reflections to 64, while it's most often 16 or 32 (it depends on the scene's lighting conditions; this time they required more sampling). Let's try lowering the skin shader's both reflection layers' sampling to 32.
But first, here's the reflection render element with a double gamma applied (very bright and low contrast):
This is the raw reflection data of every shader in the scene. I use this to emphasize reflections later during postwork, and to inspect reflection quality, like we're doing right now. As you can see, the reflections are mostly very smooth, and where you can see some speckling, those areas have nearly no reflections actually visible, so they're rendered adaptively at a lower sampling rate. Just to speed things up at no visual quality loss.
That was 64 samples. Now let's see how it goes with 32...
That's a considerable drop in reflection quality, but it also took over a minute less to render. This is nice. But does this quality drop affect the actual image?
Not unless you compare them under a microscope! The reflections are very weak after all. So that's a minute easily shaved off. I could probably set every shader's reflection quality to 32 and reduce the render time some more, but the chair isn't very reflective in general, so it doesn't take that much time to render, and stuff like Jinjing-Yu's tongue or teeth take a very tiny area, so that's all fine. Besides, 2:23 is a pretty good render time. IT WILL GROW ONCE I ADD THE HAIR NAD FINISH THE YARN but hey.
Now that this is boding well, I shall get back to ZBrush and finalize the pose.
After about 40 minutes and over 300 steps, this...
Became this:
Now we can import this finalized pose into 3ds Max and finish the yarn, add the hair, add some render elements, and that'll be ready for rendering. I guess. Maybe. I might still want to tweak some stuff before that. Anyway, here it is rendered:
I don't think I like the string. :^) Too messy. Might just redo it, but it wasn't fun to make at all. :^) Oh well! :^D Yeah, I'll simplify that soon.
Anyway, let's hide the string for now and add the hair then. In order to do that, I'll just merge it in from the neutral scene and morph it into this pose. Easy-peasy. There:
*laughs in ridiculous*
Do note the increase in render time tho; hair is slow as well. ._.
Anyway, I don't use hair simulation. It's too fiddly to set up, and doesn't work very well with my workflow. So in order to make the hair behave properly, I need to "pose" it manually by brushing. After another 30-40 minutes, we have this:
Still not perfect, but that's all the arting for today. I'll finish the hair and add the string tomorrow or so.
Enjoy maybe! :^D
Comments
tchaikovsky2
oh u <3 How I came up with Jinjing-Yu is a very difficult question. XD I guess... a) I wanted an anthro character finally b) chinese crested dogs are furless, and my computer couldn't handle fur at the time (and also I really like these doggos) c) the rest of her - the personality and stuff - just mostly evolved around a few loose concepts
tchaikovsky2
To be fair, it was probably more like 36 minutes, but yeah, it does take a while to do some stuff. XD
tchaikovsky2
There is technically no gravity involved, so no, it isn't! :^)
JustANerd
amazing meticulous quality! I tend to enjoy quality > quantity. You sir are a mastercraftsman. While I don't fully understand everything about the process its still quite interesting. I haven't dived through on earlier posts but was just curious how you came up with the ideas for this character and how she looks?
Randochi
hahaha that hair is funny! Very much enjoying the subtle little changes you're making. Its insane that it took 40 minutes to do those subtle adjustments with the pose. Seems it takes a lot of time to do your work. Now I know why you try to put so much effort into reducing render time.
Diego P
Is the tail affected by gravity too?
