Let's talk about Nico.

Hey guys, so I was going to write about Nico, but I realized I was getting too stressed and emotional about it, so I sit down and went through it. After a while, I decided to come with a less emotionally charged post, so here we go.

First things first: Ashe won. Very very rare result, since Ada Wong got submitted 4 times.

Now, back to Nico.

Nico is pretty much ready to work with. She’s done. The only thing left for her is the textures.

Since I didn’t want to wait in order to work on the textures, I decided to commission a guy to make the hard texture work for me.

The work consisted in the following:

• Putting Nico’s tattoos in the proper places on the Daz textures.
• Putting Nico’s Normal textures in the proper places on the Daz textures.

This might sound rough, but I removed 1 layer out already: I didn’t ask for the Roughness maps of the ttatoos. I will let the Normals take care of that.

Sunday Night, I believe, the commission was done. I’m personally not 100% happy with the results, however, I am not surprised at all. Remember: I wrote the cookbook. I knew exactly which one were going to be his issues, and I was right. And I also don’t blame him at all, in fact, I'm thankful for his work.

Some of the tattoos were in a working state, but some other weren’t. We had an agreement of sending them back after feedback, but I honestly realized the only way for me to have a result that I’m 100% happy with, would only be possible under my full sight, which is not possible to do. I decided to take what I could use.

The worst part of all of that, is that I realized about the issues on some of that tattoos while I was building the materials and preparing for deliver. If I were to say that I didn’t feel any stress I would be lying really damn hard.

I’m struggling massively with her left arm tattoo. That arm have a full forearm tattoo with a cobweb on the elbow. You can tell which one it is right away.

I won’t get into too much details, but if you want to talk about it, I will run down the very basics:

• Nico’s arm topology is straight. If you see the vertices in it, you can see they always go on a straight line.
• Daz’s arm topology is curved. If you see the vertices, you will notice how some of them start, for example, on the top of the shoulder, and end up under the forearm.

Because of this, Nico’s topology makes the tattoo very simple to place on her arm: you just place it. In Daz, you cannot do that because of the topology. At some points, because of the curved topology, the following can happen to the tattoo:

• It can get streteched at some parts and look weird in those particular parts. Unavoidable, but also a non-issue.
• It will misallign horribly. Unavoidable, and can be a very bad issue.

These issues with the tattoos are wearing me out incredibly fast. I have one absolute last resort, but that would mean removing yet another layer and not using the tattoos normal maps. And yet, I’m not sure how this will work since the thing that is absolutely destroying me is not the tattoo itself, is Daz’s Topology.

This is very hard and I honestly feel like I’m getting cornered really hard. I like tattoos, and I'm completely against the idea of banning characters with complex tattoos. I'm not against the idea of banning full-body tattoos, like Jack, but something like this? I don't like the idea of banning them. 

I’m going to give it a few more days.

If I’m unable to do this… I honestly don’t know what I would do. I think I might pause Patreon page and you guys won’t get charged.