Saturday, January 5, 2019

Visual Enhancements

Hi everyone,
Note this post may contain spoilers and might be a little bit technical.

For most of my games I've used a program called 3d custom girl(3DCG) to make custom characters and generate screenshots.  This program can also be modded with custom built mods.  I've made lots of custom mods and wrote programs from starch dealing with 3DCG since I started using it(though I haven't posted any online). 

The character CGs for Conception Maiden are also created using 3DCG(and MMD to a lesser degree).  Lately I've been trying to improve the quality of the character images for Conception Maiden by editing/creating mods in 3DCG.  So I thought I might tell you guys a little about it and show you some more images relating to Conception Maiden.

First, as you've seen, the characters such as Lorelei and her mother Victoria has a style that look something like this:

 School Girl Lorelei


Mother and Daughter                                      Pregnant Lorelei


With the a higher level of editing in photoshop, I can makes images a bit more elaborate, such as like this:
 Victoria sleeps with Minori

However, I was wondering if I could the character look of an even high quality, maybe something closer to like this 3DCG image(note this image isn't by me and it's also wasn't made using MMD.  It's by the pixiv user 大尉).

After looking a bit for info, I started looking for the best 3D Custom Girl hair I could find. I did find one, but there wasn't any in the right tone so I modded it. This took awhile but after that and numerous other things(such as injecting hair colors into 3DCG), I afterward, i ended up with hair textured like this:
Hair Enhancement

Looking at the image, you may notice new details and smoothness in their hair styles(I also modded lorelei's eyes).  Around this time I was also playing around with possible offspring characters for the main character to have, and I made this(with full editing):




Aside from Lorelei, these girls will probably be among the first offspring in the game. (Brown-haired girl being the child of Minori+Victoria, the Black-haired girl being the child of Minori+Lorelei).



After getting that hair stuff to work, I started wondering if I could update the entire bodies too, so I looked for nice 3DCG bodies.  Overall, there were 2 possible ones that I thought might be great for the game.  These two:

Two bodies with very different appearances

However, there are problems with using each of these bodies, the biggest being that the body on the left won't be able to wear most of 3DCG clothing, the one on the right has this problem too but not as much so there are ways i know of to get around it.  Another problem with both of the bodies is the facial expressions are different, which seems to make it impossible for me to recreate the same level of expressions i want. Also the skin tones don't match Lorelei's.  After thinking it over though, I decided to go with the one on the right because of how I thought it look overall and it's more shapely than the one on the left(I also like the lighting on it).

So experimenting with it, I still couldn't get the facial expressions right, so I though about maybe merging the body with the face from the current body(this face would also inherit some of the new lighting).  I did this for about 2 days, and got the head to merge but it didn't work out well. Either the face movements would be deformed or the body movements would be deformed.

Reverse NTR(?) facial expressions.

So instead, I took a break and modded the skin tone of the body(modding 3DCG bodies is probably the hardest thing in 3DCG to mod).  This is how it looked after I modded it for a day:

Orignal on left, new body on right

It turned out well and the new body has an improved figure with improved lighting.  I also tried modding the shape of the body to make clothes fit better but that didn't work out too well.

About two days later I came back to this and tried to update the body and head again.  This time since merging the head didn't work, I thought I would make a headless body and create the head as an "add-on part".  After modding, this worked completely, and I also made a flatter version of the body where the clothes fit a little better(and anything that didn't fit correctly I could fix in photoshop, or try modding the specific clothes).  This took about 2 more days to get working(just finished it today), but now they have familiar faces with improved bodies.

Here is how Loreiel looks now:


Click image to enlarge

I also updated the Victoria's overall figure for the new body while updating her.  Here's how she looks along with her daughter Loreiel:


The mother is now slightly taller with larger breasts for the body type, her thighs are also much thicker now.  You can also see body fat in her stomach and legs now(part of this was edited).  If I edit these images further using the techniques i usually use, I can improve the quality notably more(These bodies would also look nice if I put them in MMD).

Partly since I still want to experiment with the new bodies a little more first, they probably won't appear on Demo #2(the next demo coming out), but they're new bodies will like be in Demo#3.  This new body type is planned to be applied to all the female characters.


Um, that's all for now,
see you later.