It's been a while since I updated here and it's the main thing which has been soaking up my free time. As something I can reveal, however, I'd like to take a little time to explain something called 'shaders'.
In CGI art, this is essentially something which is applied to the surface of a model to completely change its look and how light interacts with it. You can get them for all kinds of purposes... Things which make a figure look like a spectral ghost, others which make them look like corroded metal or as if they're out of a '
Tron' film and so on.
And shaders are something which have massively helped what I've been doing. Just constructed a scene demands things like good placement of light, shadows and, believe it or not, reflections (because in CGI, you can actually exert control over those, too). While I can't promise something which is photo-realistic, I'd like to at least make it look as
good as I can.
Sometimes, however, a product comes along which can have unintended, but intriguing, visual effects. An example of this comes from yesterday, where a new shader was released which is designed to take account of things like glittering paint for fingernails. All well and good, but something caught my eye about how it interacted on a belt... And, after some fiddling around with the surface settings, I was able to create a nicely realistic reflection effect, which is great for recreating the look of fluid or oil-based smearing.
Or Alien resin.
Spoiler
Before:
After:
These should
not be considered of the same quality I'm using for the actual project. There's only one indirect light involved and no shadows (which is what's giving this one an uncanny valley look), because I was using it purely to test the shader's effect. What's interesting is that it makes the surface of the head, torso and arms now look as if they're glistening with an oily sheen.
The down side of this, as you can also see, is that it made the legs and tail look much less realistic. From what I can tell, this seems more down to how the shader is using the surface of the model, itself, rather than the painted textures. Because of this, more work is needed before it can be applied to the project, but I'm already looking into how a glistening shader which doesn't interfere with any pre-existing textures might be possible.
So, a small example of how, just like with live-action film projects, I'm sometimes finding ways to use elements and effects in ways their creators had never thought of.
Also a part of why this has been taking so long, because the technology is constantly evolving and allowing me to experiment with environments and techniques I hadn't originally thought would be a possibility.
