Bound By Night

BtS: Renders and Displacement Maps (NSFW/Chapter 8 Spoilers)

Added 2022-11-22 21:00:06 +0000 UTC

NOTE: I was going through my Drafts folder and found this sitting in there! For folks interested in how BBN is made, it might be a mildly interesting technical discussion. So, even though it relates to an old update, I thought it was still worth sharing.

In a previous post, I mentioned sometimes I don't see problems with a render until after they're run. I thought I'd share an example here of one such issue.

WARNING: This post contains images that may be considered as spoilers for Chapter 8.

When I prepare a scene, it is done with a (graphically speaking) very simple representation of the models with only some single-shade textures, a small fraction of the polygons that are calculated for the actual renders, and very basic lighting. I can change the display for a preview of how the image will render, but it tends to load slowly and -- with as many renders as I need for BBN -- it isn't feasible to check every scene from every angle before rendering them.

So, here is a before shot from one of the scenes in Chapter 8. On the left is what I see in the 3D software while I'm posing the models, and on the right is how it actually renders. Everyone has their own tastes but, to my eye, Alex's scrotum is just not attractive. It's not just wrinkly but bumpy in a way that doesn't look healthy (or juicy) to me.

When I leave most of the settings the same but select a different displacement map, I can see differences as wild as this:

And here is the final result, with a comparison between the original render and what I ultimately settled on. You can see the scrotum is a little more plump and not quite as rough/shriveled as in the original.