Catwalk C

Here is catwalk C. Which, hopefully is the a mix between the best parts of A and B:

https://vimeo.com/387187552

Here is a video on a girl practicing some martial arts:

https://vimeo.com/387187460

A or B

Tried a couple of animations, along of which are 2 catwalk animations. Which one do you like more?

A:

https://i.imgur.com/TCjANFu.mp4

B:

https://i.imgur.com/EMgyUee.mp4

Recommend a simple video clip capture program

The new body mesh + rig is working now, looking to post some short animation videos in the future.

I used to use the screenToGif to capture the animations and post the animation clip as a gif file. It has an easy to use interface and works well. However, the gif format introduces very noticeable artifacts and gets really big, even for simple clips. So I am looking for gif alternatives.
Suggestions are welcome!

Here is an example of what I meant. Here is the gif version of the animation:

Whereas the actual result looks more like this:

New Face v1

Putting things together, here is the result.

Also, turns out I got screwed by blender's crappy subsurface scattering implementation for yestoday's post. I use blender to pick the colors then exports the model to the game. But blender's crappy SSS implementation changes the material's base color in a very unexpected manner (and probably, incorrect manner). Which causes the exported material color to be off from what I expected, so the results were weird.

I fixed the problem and here is what the new skin looks like now. Here is another shot of the New Face:

Next up, I am going to finish up the new base body + rig, then we can start making some animations.

Subsurface Scattering

Implemented a new shader effect, subsurface scattering, that is very important for rendering "plausible" skin. Here is the final result: (ignore the seam at neck + eyes/eyebrows)

Without this effect, here is what the skin looks like:

But this picture isnt exactly representative because even in previous posts, I implemented the easier half of the effect, so it looks more like this:

But even so, the skin is still a bit too harsh so a post processing effect is required to soften it up even further, which brings us to picture #1:

Hair Shader v3 and SSAO

That wasnt even it's final form! Decided to implement a more physically based hair shading model instead of only mocking with anisotropic lighting. Here is the result:

Whats really nice about this shader is that it has 2 rather intuitive material parameters that you can use to further control the hair highlights. I really wish I have the slider UI implemented so I can show a gif, but alas, I don't atm. So here are some pictures instead.

The first parameter is Smoothness (or Roughness known in other engines/modelers) that controls the oversize size of the highlight:

Really large and unfocused highlight:

Smalled and more focused highlight:

The second parameter is "Metalness," which controls the ratio of specular highlight versus diffuse:

More metallic:

Very Metallic:

The second feature added is SSAO! You might not noticed it, but it's there for all the pictures above. Here is the first picture without SSAO:

Here is the "after" for comparison:

This uses a new and improved implementation compared to what HR and HRT had. One of the more noticeable effects is mitigation against the "halo" effect:

Before:

After mitigation:

*These 2 pictures are taken with a stronger SSAO effect to highlight the halo. The outlines are from a separate effect, not from SSAO.

Hair shader improvements

Worked on the hair shader some more, here is what it looks like now:

Happy New Year

Hope everyone had a good holiday. I begin working on in-game rendering. Here is a before/after for the hair.

WARNING: spooky floating head ahead.

This is the final product with hair shader:

 This is with the default shader:

Here is with the default shader + normal map:

And once again, with the hair shader: