Updates and WIPs 04/27/19

With the second iteration of the demo for SFMVR_STITCH being tested, things have been pretty busy at Dark Dreams, yet again. The top image is from the WIP I posted below of "Mei Getting Reaped". It's been am extremely busy week!

Even though that is the case, I'll finally be sitting down and finishing up (cross your fingers) the Elizabeth studio release today. And we have a couple WIPs to share as well.

I figured I would also share some progression photos of what our video used to look like in the past, what they look like now when remastered, and also what happens after some post work is applied. Because of the time I spend on the actual videos I don't often (enough) explain the process or give any idea of what we actually do behind the scenes.

Here is the original version of PallidSFM's, "Momiji Needed to be Taken"

As you can see the angle barely showed the male model, the textures in the background were kinda blah, the coloring and lighting is pretty good (thanks to Pallid) but in VR there wasn't any post so we didn't use the best level of depth in VR that we could have.

Here is the remastered version:

Not only is the animation higher resolution, but's in barrel format which has less distortion and a more natural POV. Due to the new coding the new demo also lowers noise, removes aliasing, and removes a good bit of the stitching caused by AO. I changed the lighting a bit to amplify the depth in VR, as well as the posing of the models so you can actually see Ryu as he does his thing. I also switched out some of the models in the background and edited the scene to be more immersive, as the set was just missing as it wasn't supposed to be seen in VR, originally. Of course, with moving Ryu I had to also move Momiji to match his position. In VR it looks like the same animation, but in 2D it looks a good bit different. To boot, I extended the animation to be longer by adding some variation to the detailed animation. All in all it's almost an entirely new video altogether.

Lastly is the scene after post:

As you can see, the animation is way smoother after denoising and color correction, as well as having more depth with the color grading. Most of the aliasing that was caused in the stitching is removed, and I decided to warm up the colors as a personal artistic touch (which also happened to enhance depth even further in VR).

That's all I have for now. Back to work I go. I'll talk to you all soon!

-DZ