Your Feedback and Ciri Work In Progress

Recently i've been alternating between Panam (CP77) and Ciri (TW3) because they're both my favorite characters and quite frankly, I could probably make art of them forever. They're just that much fun to work with. That said, I don't know how fair this is on everyone else, so I figured i'd ask.

Questions for you

Patreon wouldn't let me make a multi-question poll, so:

1. Cyberpunk 2077: Are you okay with the frequency of Panam renders, or do you want to see a greater focus on other characters?
2. The Witcher 3: Are you okay with the frequency of Ciri renders, or do you want to see a greater focus on other characters?
3. Would you like to see female Futanari (Futa) variants/content, or are you indifferent to it?

If you have any other queries please feel free to leave a reply or join the 'Community' in the Patreon sidebar and let me know.

Other than that, here's a review of what I've been working on recently.

Update: New animation

I'm starting my next animation. It'll probably be Cyberpunk 2077 based and i'll keep you all updated. 🍆🍑

Update: Improvements to my Ciri character model

TLDR: If you don't want to read everything all you need to know is that i'm rebuilding Ciri's hair from scratch with emphasis on creating realistic, groomable hair strands.

When R34 artists create Blender character models, for hair we usually just extract the raw hair mesh from the game because it's fast and requires no grooming experience. That’s what I originally did for my Ciri model.

However, this approach has it's limitations:
Limitation 1: It's game hair, therefore it's not realistic. TW3 is a real-time video game that must run at 60 FPS. Naturally, sacrifices must be made. Ciri's game hair mesh ultimately boils down to a bunch of transparent hair strand PNGs stringed together to resemble hair.

This is perfectly fine for a game but as seen below its simply too blocky for realistic 3D rendering. Yes, you can subdivide the geometry, upscale the textures, do some Photoshop in post (i've been doing all three up until this point), but it'll only get you so far.

(To be clear i'm not criticizing the developers here. It would have been computationally irresponsible for them to render hair at a per-strand level.)

Limitation 2: You can't groom the hair. Sure you can sculpt the mesh and move blobs of it around but that's not really "grooming". You can't naturally comb it like you would with real hair.

The solution: render every single strand

I've decided to recreate Ciri's hair entirely from scratch. This involved learning and switching to a new, procedural hair system which leverages Blender's Geometry Node system. It still hurts my head and i'm far from an expert - I still have a million things to learn.

But in any case, this has three key advantages:
1. More realistic - every single strand of hair is now rendered. This means realistic light and shadow interactions.
2. More capable - hair strands can be digitally groomed to create different looks.
3. More modular - hair strands can have different properties. For example, braided, curly, straight, frizzy and so on. This will be very useful for when I create her TW4 braided hair!

Here's my first attempt at a hair groom. Click here for full size image.

To be clear this is far from perfect. There are things that bother me & require improvement. For example, the side hairs are too stiff and don't "end" gracefully. Other parts need refinement as well.

But hey, it's progress.

What about her Witcher 4 hair?

The progress i've made so far with her Witcher 3 appearance is ultimately a stepping stone to creating her Witcher 4 appearance. The techniques i'm learning now can be re-applied later. I think the above hair needs another iteration to fix the issues I outlined, but when that's done it'll be full steam ahead on TW4 Ciri.