September Devlog - 3D Girls

Welcome to another devlog!

This time we'll be discussing lots of small bits of progress along with a couple big steps. Much of this month was occupied by commission work (more than usual) but I did still manage to find time to work on Rockin' Resort and, by extension, Catgirl Care. Let's go ahead and dive into the details!

Water Shader Fix

My water shader had an issue where objects drawn over the surface would still be distorted as if they were underwater. While this is fine most of the time, when looking at the edges of objects you could see odd spikes. I've since fixed this issue and optimized the code to hopefully run faster.

While this isn't a big major fix, it is something I wanted to showcase because I've been putting up with the bug for a month and I'm happy to finally squash it!

Base Mesh Improvements

You may remember the previous devlog, where I showed off the new base character mesh that I intend to use to simplify creating character models.

In that previous devlog, I showcased how the base mesh's shading broke in Godot. This took some tinkering to fix, but it should shade smoothly now. The anime-style face shading (via a normals proxy) couldn't be applied to expressions on export from Blender. The fix was ultimately to remove the effect and manually clean up each expression.

Unfortunately, fixing the face shading also meant that the eyes were receiving broken lighting, which is what the anime-style effect was meant to fix. For my 3D models, I'm using concave eyes with floating irises. This matches my 2D art style but can be visibly concave in certain lighting. The solution I'm now using makes the surface receive the same light across the entire eye, effectively creating a flat surface where shading fades in and out. This matches how I typically shade eyes in 2D, so I'm pretty happy with result.

The base mesh isn't 100% finalized and likely never will be, but it's at least done enough that I can get to work on the girls!

The Girls

Work in Progress! Pay not mind to the iris clipping + wrong heights.

They might not have clothes and aren't rigged yet but all 4 girls have their hair and expressions. I briefly experimented with different modeling techniques for the hair but I've found the method I used for Date a Mink 3D (a simple, solid mesh) still works best for my art.

I'm also finally getting to stress test my texture packing method. Each girl uses one small texture where the color palette is stored in the corner and only key details (makeup, nipples, eyes, etc) are drawn. It's not exactly innovative but it works really well for cartoon-y characters so I'm pretty happy with it, especially for Crystal and Julia's hair gradients.

What's Next?

I've been very busy with commission work but I plan to adjust my schedule to allow for more development time. Hopefully this will lead to more progress being made!

My current focuses are on getting a teaser demo out for Rockin' Resort which will give me a chance to finish and release Catgirl Care Chibi and get started on Catgirl Care. The main progress focuses for this upcoming month are assets (character models, a test environment, etc) and a small narrative scrip issue that may either be a small fix or a new implementation. Either way, I'm hoping to make a lot of progress!

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Anyhow, thanks for supporting my work! Keeping up with rewards and development can be a lot of work, but I really enjoy the work I do and I wouldn't be able to do it without your support.

Thanks for reading!