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2023 - News - August Update
The first and biggest piece of news is the Group Project idea winning the poll for the next SubscribeStar comic. I've started working on the character and environment models as well as working out the exact story beats to prepare for the first part to come out on September 1st. This should be a fun comic to make and it's one I'm pretty excited about and want to make as high quality as possible.
On the craft side, I discovered this week that a previous Iray update introduced the ability to make lights in a scene hidden both to the camera and in reflections. This should be a pretty big improvement to the comic creation process, as a lot of the process of making a good render is the trial and error of carefully placing lights so that they don't get picked up by the camera or show up on shiny surfaces.
This also made blowjobs scenes very hard to light well because no lights could be placed between the characters to illuminate the action without being visible. I also had to avoid using most glass and reflective materials because the lights would get reflected in the scene. You can see one of the worst examples of this in one panel from SA2 I used a bunch of ring lights in the ceiling to provide soft scene lighting, but they were also visible in all the wine glasses. So going forward, not only will making panels be faster and have better lighting, but it opens up a lot more poses, materials, and cool stuff like mirror shots and sex against glass.
Finally, I've also removed a number of lower quality hair models from my library in favor of just using the best quality ones, as well as further standardizing hair colors and materials.
The first and biggest piece of news is the Group Project idea winning the poll for the next SubscribeStar comic. I've started working on the character and environment models as well as working out the exact story beats to prepare for the first part to come out on September 1st. This should be a fun comic to make and it's one I'm pretty excited about and want to make as high quality as possible.
On the craft side, I discovered this week that a previous Iray update introduced the ability to make lights in a scene hidden both to the camera and in reflections. This should be a pretty big improvement to the comic creation process, as a lot of the process of making a good render is the trial and error of carefully placing lights so that they don't get picked up by the camera or show up on shiny surfaces.
This also made blowjobs scenes very hard to light well because no lights could be placed between the characters to illuminate the action without being visible. I also had to avoid using most glass and reflective materials because the lights would get reflected in the scene. You can see one of the worst examples of this in one panel from SA2 I used a bunch of ring lights in the ceiling to provide soft scene lighting, but they were also visible in all the wine glasses. So going forward, not only will making panels be faster and have better lighting, but it opens up a lot more poses, materials, and cool stuff like mirror shots and sex against glass.
Finally, I've also removed a number of lower quality hair models from my library in favor of just using the best quality ones, as well as further standardizing hair colors and materials.
Oops, typo in the post, it'll actually come out September 1st.
hi, just out of curiosity, ghost light wouldn't prevent it from reflecting off the glasses???
So there's actually two types, one is an actual light with a glowing ball attached, in addition to casting light this creates specular highlights on things which makes them shiny. This kind of light still shows up in reflections. I use a few of them in a scene to cast strong lighting on the characters. There's also another type of light emitting object which is just a piece of geometry that is set to glow really bright. It doesn't create specular highlights, and this kind of object is completely hidden even in reflections (it requires a special script to hide them). I usually fill the ceiling with these big glowing objects to create soft lighting in the environment and set the base level of light in the scene. So all the environment lights are completely invisible, and the character lights do need to be placed more carefully if they are showing in reflections, but since there's only a handful, and they are still hidden from the camera, they are easier to avoid. In the panels I'm working on now, when the character lights show up in the glasses the characters are wearing, I can fix it by moving the light a little, or I can turn off the glass within the frames so it's invisible, or I can replace the character light with a strong environment light and give up the specular effect in order to completely hide that light.