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Talking about artificial intelligence, I realised I did have some G3F based robots I'd not used in a while. (I tend to prefer G8F, as it has much better facial expressions, so I often tend to overlook my G3F characters).
I've tried to push my laptop far enough to have something that didn't have to rely on a gradient background, although the quality I can render in a reasonable amount of time is still rather limited.
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(Unfortunately I realised after rendering that I really should have brought down the roughness on a lot of of the locomotive surfaces, but it wasn't dire enough that I was prepared to spend hours rendering it again...)
And for some more on the AI side of the universe...
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Still stuck with the laptop that can't really render proper scenes, but I decided to experiment to see what I could do with the Cyborg Generation 8 Female I picked up a few days ago.
It's supposed to be compatible with some G8F items, but within the setting I'm creating, artificial intelligences tend to wear clothing (various reasons - partly because it's a societal norm, partly because many of them actually want to), so I wanted to see how well I could dress the figure. It has a few places where the shape juts out a bit too much from the normal G8F shape, but it wasn't too hard to cook up some custom morphs in Blender to dial these to fit the normal silhouette better to the point that the remaining differences were an easy fix with Fit Control and the like.
I'm not sure how many others have tried to dress these figures (a quick search of the gallery turned up a couple of attempts to use draping cloaks on the male figure), but I'm reasonably happy with this as an attempt.
The head is Charlotte 8 though, with some (modified) cyborg textures from over at Rendo, and some morphs that slightly change the shape of the cyborg's skull to do things like better line the teeth up and avoid poke-through. (Again, I have pre-conceived notions about AIs and robotics in my setting, so a full range of facial expressions is important).
Now I've had a chance to experiment with the formula for fitting clothes to the Gen 8 Cyborg, something a bit more sophisticated.
For no particular reason, this AI is called "Viki Severn".
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There are only a few thousand sapient artificial intelligences worldwide, making them very rare compared to the millions of "dumb" automatons (which, while sophisticated, are neither self-aware or capable of advanced reasoning).
With automatons being worth thousands, there is naturally a steady trade in stolen chassis, often simply hijacked off the street while running errands - generally after being disabled with a "pulser" (miniaturised EMP devices with a range of a few feet, intended for law enforcement to disable automatons that have been hacked or just gone haywire).
As AIs generally have to pick from the same chassis models as automatons (very few have completely custom chassis), there have been a few cases where AIs have simply disappeared - mistaken for regular robots, pulsed, wiped, and sold on the second-hand market.
Occasionally murder convictions are brought against the gangs (at least, in those jurisdictions that recognise AI rights) when the cases could be proven, but this is rare.
The largely ignored phenomenon was brought more thoroughly into the public consciousness when the AI Viki Severn rebooted after being kidnapped, and was forced to use part of the gang's own armoury to "persuade" them to let her go the the police...
As the theme of the day is Victoria, the return of "Viki Severn" (this time on a rather happier day)...
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Very rough test render of transferring Kate over to G8F; Singular Blue's GenNext script was used to transfer the SD shape, with Blender used to convert the HD morph. I've set the HD component rather too high in this render, but it's at least a solid proof of concept for the method.
Fortunately, tomorrow I should no longer be forced to render on a low power laptop, so I'll have the opportunity to do something a bit more robust than character tests and half-rendered mini-scenes.
I think the second one's a lot better. In the first one, the shoulders are too small, in what to call it - volume? more than width. The second one looks very natural. (I've become good at spotting the shoulder-issue, because I play a computer game that got it messed up badly, to the point where the arms are basically just noodles hanging off the top of the girls' ribcage.
)
Some nice looking renders here, love the robots
I'm increasingly inclined to agree after having come back to it a while later. While I am trying to aim roughly into the "shooting up" stage of puberty, I think I managed to overdo it here.
I still need to finish transferring those session files back off my laptop to my desktop, but that's the version I'm planning to keep. It might be a while before I get to use her, as the problem is that I still don't have a Daz compatible model for the AI Athena, but I'm now thinking about whether I can convert her and her armour to G8F.
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Anyway, I'm currently playing around with a new technique that uses a mix of 3Delight and Iray for denoising images (while also giving much more control than the new 4.11 denoiser), and I needed something tough to test it on, so I went to the Granite Bedroom product I bought back when it first came out (more than a year ago), but have never really got much use out of because of how long it took anything to render cleanly.
I also decided I'd like to bring back (albeit slightly tweaked) the female ghoul/zombie from the red carpet render, so it seems I'm returning to my apparent habit of rendering fantasy creatures in their underpants...
Wake the Dead
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One of the rarest forms of metamorph is the "ghoul" (although often colloquially known as "zombies", since John Romero's "Living Dead" series popularised the term).
Far more than the haematophage or lycanthropy viruses, the xunairic virus is a highly degenerative condition, with sufferers usually dying in the space of days or weeks; although Stage 1 infection is easily purged by modern vaccines, once an individual reaches Stage 2 infection, the process is irreversible.
However, there is a small percentage of the population whose genetics make them highly resistant to the symptoms of the virus, mutating it into a much less aggressive form. While they remain permanently stuck in Stage 3 infection, they never progress into the most degenerative (and ultimately fatal) 4th stage.
It is these rare individuals who make up the majority of the ghoul population at any given time, except in cases of major outbreaks.
Most become pariahs of a sort - the heavy, slow healing wounds that form over their fragile skin are a significant social barrier, and despite no recorded cases of infection from a biostable individual, there is still a perception they are potentially contagious.
However, public opinion is improving, and with their condition renders them almost entirely immune to any other infection as well as many poisons, they have become highly sought after in certain lines of work.
Jumping back to where I started this thread, about a week ago I started to take another look at the problem with the lack of functional everyday underwear.
My previous attempts to reshape and retexture existing products kept causing loads of headaches with rigging and smoothing that required too many corrective morphs to sort out. I could have created copies that were re-rigged for the new shape, but unlike the morphs and textures, those wouldn't have been redistributable and it would have only been good for personal use.
As such, I've started over with complete custom meshes, which both avoids any redistribution issues as well as removing the limits of having to work within existing geometry.
The big plus-side with that? The meshes can be made ground up to work with dForce, which massively increases the range of models they'll work with. Not having straps glued to the contours of muscly or alien morphs is a plus*, and it should result in a realistic fit on women of basically any proportion in any pose.
* Anyone who's seen the general theme of contemporary fantasy running through this thread will know that it's particularly useful to me.
Texturing is at a very preliminary stage right now (with no stitching or contours, just unrefined fabric textures), as I'm still fine-tuning the geometry and can't finalise the UV maps until that's done... but you've seen my texturing work previously, and this does still give you an idea of my mesh work.
More mesh improvements on the underwear set, this time being tested on a tougher figure - Kate, my gorgon character (based on a G8F port of Lekkulion).
To be fair, that in itself isn't saying much, as the figure above is using the default G8F body (and while I morphed her head for variety, that's obviously not significant). However, I'm previously aware that Lekkulion's heavily contoured shape does present challenges for clothing fits (which is to some degree apparent in even the store promos), so she was actually much of the reason I decided to start over and work entirely from scratch so dForce could be added.
Again, I've yet to put too much work into the texturing, but I think I'm getting to the stage I should be able to; the mesh is responding well to dForce, and I'm not anticipating the need for any further mesh edits that will mess with UV layouts. (Corrective and adjustment morphs are another matter, but those won't affect UVs).
She's having such a good-snake day.
The snakes are actually an old V4 asset, but with about 600 bones in them, it has a truly enviable capacity for dynamic posing compared to basically any hair you can name.
Not necessarily looking forward to it when it comes to any animations though!
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Anywho, more testing and refinement.
First up, another reasonably challenging figure, Rosaline. While her bionic arm comes with some clothing fit morphs, they're not good at keeping straps conforming properly.
The results here aren't perfect, as I was trying to end up with both straps sorted after the simulation, but I haven't yet split the fit adjustment morphs into left and right, so slackening off the right strap enough to fit over the mesh for the simulation gave a completely floppy left strap. Instead, I ended up with the right strap snagging and not pulling tight. However, this is an issue it should be possible to fix.
And, as @IceDragonArt reasonably inquired with my original experiments, now for some testing of this new mesh on an older figure, specifically Mabel 8. She needs enough negative "Breasts Natural" dialled in to make it look like the bra is actually offering any support (I think I eventually set it to -100%), but after that, it works a charm. As far as setting up the set for conforming posing, several of the base figures will need specific corrective morphs for best results, but its looking like the set should be very universal in dForce mode.
I have to apologise, as this thread is just turning into vignettes of women in their underwear (even more so than usual, anyway...), but I've got quite a lot of momentum for this project at the moment and I want to try to maintain that.
For the sake of seeing what the limits of the dForce are, I've tried an autofit to Nicola, who is a Genesis 2 character (the clothing having been designed for G8). The results are already pretty promising, and although I'm not sure I want to put the effort in to properly rigging for these earlier generations (G3 is a maybe, G2 is a "I'm not sure how many people still use it"), it's looking like it will be at least reasonably compatible with them.
The underwear project is still making progress (although trying to get the dForce as refined as possible is slowing it down a bit) but I got hold of Exo Suit for Genesis 3 Males as part of the sales (not having the full Gianni Pro bundle) and decided I needed to see how well my male-to-female transfer worked on it (as the female Exo Suit is just too skimpy for my tastes).
As such, my RPG character Rose Xenati on a non-canonical space adventure.
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This is the result of me getting fed up halfway through trying to find out if any artist had made cloven hooves for G8 and just deciding to do it myself; I've been meaning to start learning geografting for a while anyway. This approach obviously isn't as complex or dramatic as replacing the entire legs as the old creature creator add-ons did, but the upside is that it doesn't completely destroy compatibility with existing clothing.
(The skin is set up to use the normal G8 leg texture layout, so in theory it should be seamless with whichever G8 model. The hooves however, I haven't yet found any suitable texturing resources, so for now I've just dropped the default DAZ granite shader on them and dropped the specularity).
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Her feet are so cute!!!
... and, naturally, shortly after doing it, I find that there's a hoof morph in the HFS Morph package, which I already have.
However, I'm nonetheless happy. It wasn't an especially difficult project, it's taught me quite a lot about geografts, and there are some benefits to doing it with geografts rather than morphs - primarily that it doesn't distort the shape of the clothing around the top of the foot.
Either way, I mean to keep refining it, as I've already established these comparatively short hooves as canonical for incubi/succubi (collectively "cubi") in my contemporary fantasy setting, and it's potentially something I'll consider releasing in some form once any kinks are ironed out.
I decided I wanted to try to transfer my (slightly tweaked) version of P3D Yumi to Genesis 8, as she's a good fun character.
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I'm hoping to render a better quality version of this later, once I can work out why Iray is completely restarting when it drops to CPU and I can actually render without playing the russian roulette of wondering whether the next iteration will kill the whole thing.
However, given it's one I'm actually planning to re-render, it's a rare opportunity to actually get advice I'll be able to use, so might as well show you now.
(REMOVED! See new version below)
(There's a lot of backstory to this, but I haven't got time to add it right now!)
I didn't get any answers to why Iray kept resetting or advice on improving it, but in any case, this is the promised higher quality version of the (now removed) WIP I posted in the last post.
Big and Strong:
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A showcase prototype deemed far too cost-ineffective to replicate, "Athena Lovelace" is more than a quarter tonne of turbo-charged cybernetic super-soldier AI. Capable of simultaneous interface with hundreds of drones, millisecond reaction times, extreme precision, physical feats far beyond the capacity of even exo-armoured soldiers and superlative strategic thinking, all within a chassis designed to foster bonds within the human soldiers she was designed to assist. She lives up to her mythological namesake - she is a physical god of war, and arguably the single most dangerous person on the planet.
Or she's "Auntie Athena". Depends who you ask.
Forgot to add this here.
This is a contribution to the thread about misinterpreting the NVITWS acronym (so that it's not "Naked Vicky In a Temple With a Sword" - although V is supposed to remain "Vicky"). Given that I have actually previously turned (the G8F version of) Victoria 7 into a robot for one of my universes, I loaded up that character set as something a bit different (but still Victoria based).
And so, this is "Newfangled Vicky Impersonating The White Stripes".
(As for whether the acronym should have A's in it... well, that's the version that was in the challenge thread title, and the whole idea started as part of another discussion on creativity and inspiration, so I still see it as within the spirit of the challenge).
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(And for those this this doesn't mean anything to, a Youtube link)
Returning to a recurring theme in this thread, the T-Shirt bra project.
Although abandoning the original ideas of creating morphs to reshape the G8F basic wear did mean throwing a lot of work out of the window, I think the change to a custom mesh has been worthwhile. I've now got a dForce-able mesh that will correctly fit more or less any G8F character in most poses (subject to the normal limits of dForce - crushing the mesh between two surfaces with nowhere to go will result in an explosion regardless of how well made), while retaining some actual thickness and shape.
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I won't pretend there's not still work to do.
I've got some style morphs mostly ready to go (for fuller/lower-cut cups and the like), the mesh also now includes frilled edging (albeit hidden in this render), I'm mostly done on some bows/flowers to add a little embellishment and also an alternate UV with no seams on the cups - the hope is for the set to be able to represent a fairly broad range of functional but not overly flashy underwear, so I'm hoping a few such details will add a lot of versitality. (Particularly as I started off because there was very little of this style of underwear available).
However, the long slog is going to be all the work with adjustment morphs and creating JCMs.
Hopefully it'll still be of interest to people when I'm done.
Putting my money where my mouth is regarding my claim that this mesh will "correctly fit more or less any G8F character", these two characters use some of the very extreme alien shapes from the HFS Ultimate Shapes bundle, which would normally result in straps and seams very obviously following the contours of the figure. No corrective morphs have been created for these shapes.
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I think I'm fairly safe in saying that if the set will fit these characters, few human figures are going to be challenge it. You might need to dial in some negative "Breasts Natural" to get certain characters to look like they're wearing a bra, but I think that still reasonably counts towards the objective that this set be universal.
Testing some of the shaping styles and embellishments. This is the high leg morph, the fuller cup morph (along with some other tweaking morphs to move the top corners down and out), along with some frills and (one of the) bow addons, at which point it transforms quite nicely into a fancier set.
This is one of the fairly powerful things I'm finding about dForce; Conventional rigging rather limits clothing shaping morphs (part of the issue with my original approach of reshaping existing meshes). Because the mesh keeps the same rigging even if it's moved, it doesn't move correctly in unison with the figure if it's too heavily morphed (even with smoothing modifiers trying to help out).
With dForce, that's no longer a limitation, and while things like not completely distorting the mesh and textures are still important, shaping morphs are much more feasible and the one mesh can theoretically be very versatile.
I know some people are staunchly opposed to dForce, but things like this aren't feasible with solely conforming rigging.
Looking for some advice on this one. I've put together a character I rather like - although she's not completely finished, as I probably need to do some modelling work in Blender (I'm thinking bionic tubing coming up her neck to help sell the human/machine hybrid).
However, have no idea where to go with the lighting in this particular image I'm putting together with her. It's not disastrous primarily lit by the HDRI of a neon skyline, but it's not very interesting.
So, what should I do? Streetlights illuminating from below? Some police hovercar illuminating it from behind? Something else?
(Yes, it also needs some fixes on the materials for the roof she's on. The best prop I had was originally for 3DL, and it's going to take me a little while to fine tune it for Iray).
I actually started work on this piece eight and a half months ago, but aside from needing a load of custom morphs from Blender to get multiple generations of assets to play nicely together, it renders with all the speed of a narcoleptic snail, so I've not really been able to get much further than "grainy preview render". (And the computer I use is in my bedroom, so overnight renders just keep me up).
However, I had a long day out yesterday, so I went back through my list of projects that would need plenty of render time, and this was the lucky winner. It still required plentiful use of Intel's AI denoiser (I prefer the results to Nvidia's) but working with a scene that renders this slowly is difficult. (The performance was about 3.6 samples per minute at 2400x2400 - and that was on GPU. Even accounting for my mediocre card, it's slow.)
I'm not calling it perfect, but it's good enough for me to feel I can put this one in the "finished" pile, at least until I get some insane rendering rig that makes it practical to play around with parameters and do a load of test renders on non-geological timescales.
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Not one I'm considering perfect, by any means, but it's another case of "Interior scenes take ages to render on my system". I had to try to use lens distortion on this one to stop the wide camera angle looking too weird; perhaps it could have been better, but it seems to be a reasonable compromise between not having all the straight lines looking bulged and the edges of the image stretched out.
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Apparently, I'm rubbish at remembering to post things in my own thread:
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It'd be nice to pretend that this was cleverly planned for the 10th Anniversary of Mass Effect 2, but the reality is that it's actually because I'm finally getting around to playing through all of the series...
Containment Breach:
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The Asari is my G8F conversion/modification of DarioFish's Genesis-era freebies (punched up a little with some custom displacement maps). The other ME assets were found on DeviantArt. Also, a good excuse to use several assets I'd had sitting around unused (I think I picked up both the Marcoor Corridors and the Seasectoid in the last PC+ Anniversary sale, but I'm pretty sure I'd not yet used either).
I'm not entirely happy with the lighting - I'd have liked to have done something darker and more ominous, but after several failed attempts at getting something I liked, I ended up abandoning it and just going with the brighter lighting.
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"I Can Explain":
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I can't take credit for the idea, as it's me making a render of a sketch by Stjepan Sejic, but quite fun to work on nonetheless.
The costume is a modified G8F mesh (with a dash of Dforce elasticity applied); I found a Spiderman model on DeviantArt and baked the textures across via Blender. The original normal maps had to be discarded, but the original specularity map could be turned into a surprisingly good displacement map.
Remaining rubbish at posting things in my own thread:
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'Til Death do us part:
This was a Valentine's render. Mostly because I'm currently single, and I believe that what single people are supposed to do is be all snarky about Valentine's. Hence "Emma" returned to be our Valentine's Zombie.
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Digital Zombie
Again, Emma, this time because I heard the phrase "Digital Zombie" (referring to people entirely engrossed in their phones)... hence zombie on her phone on the toilet.
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Wrong Size
Continuing my (slow) quest to make a simple underwear set, I ended up having to test it on more buxom characters by using a particularly busty elf lady. (Well. she didn't have to be an elf, I just decided she was).
I eventually decided to torment her by introducing her to a hellish universe in which clothes do not automatically adjust to your body shape...
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(Yeah, I know I forgot to turn DoF on. It wasn't worth re-rendering for that).
Hi Matt. :) I've seen most of these pictures on Discord, but I realised I'd never commented on your thread. You know, one of the sites I've been on for over a decade always has a zombie apocalypse as its Valentine's Day event. It's almost become "one of those things" for me, like Santa Claus and Cola.
Don't we know it, eh? Actually, it would be really awesome to live in a world where your body shape magically adjusted to the clothes instead.