BtS: A Troublesome Tiger (minor spoilers for Chapter 12)

!! Minor Spoilers ahead for the latest update !!

I hope everyone had a great weekend and maybe got to spend some time with the latest update. If you did, you'll know I included a special asset in the latest renders:  the white tiger. Although, in truth, the white tiger was several assets, including a special utility that calculated all the polygons for the fur. All of this wound up complicating some of the images in Mayhew's office.

How so?

Well, my typical workflow involves staging every scene including placement of the models, lighting and cameras during the day, then I put those in a queue that actually creates the renders overnight while I'm sleeping. There are some limitations to this approach, such as I don't see the results of a render until the next day so, if there are a dozen images all with the same defect (and I can't fix it quickly in Photoshop), I have to re-run all of them. But, on the whole, it is a huge increase in my efficiency. However, with the white tiger, there was a problem. Here's how he turned out after the overnight render (note the complete lack of fur).

There's no fur because, for that to render, I have to run it manually through a special utility designed to handle the fur. This is because the fur model requires a lot of calculations for all the polygons and textures. But, if I try to run that with a lot of other assets in the seen, it slows to a crawl. So, I've had to run it independently (after deletion 90+% of the assets in a scene), like this:

Once I have the two images, I can overlay them in Photoshop and wind up with an end result that looks like this:

It was a bit tedious and cumbersome but I hope you agree it paid off in the end. The white tiger probably won't be making too many appearances in the future due to the process involved in putting him in a scene, but it was fun!

As a side note, the presence of the rug under the tiger was a last minute, almost whimsical addition to the scene but I'm really glad I did it! Having that rug made Photoshopping the two layers a lot easier as I didn't have to worry about stray fur overlapping on the floor.

Later This Week:  A poll to get your impression of the new post-processing effects I'm running on the images.