#expensive things

[mrs-trophy-wife]

[askagamedev]

I read a post once about how revolutionary it was when a cutscene first showed a character undressing (IIRC the character took off a jacket). Can you expand on why that was such a technical feat and the process it took to get there?

The concept of physicality doesn’t actually exist in graphics. There’s no such thing as a solid object in CG - only the visual representation of something. CG models don’t have mass, skin, weight, internal organs, muscle, fat, or actually anything of substance. They’re essentially hollow 3D wireframe skeletons with a bunch of 2D textures stretched over the outside and a bunch of lighting calculations to determine what they should look like. This means that there is no such thing as “clothing” on top of skin, there is only different parts of the same model. The character’s clothing is just as much a part of the body as the skin or the hair. A CG model can’t normally remove clothes because there are no clothes to remove - the part that looks like clothing is actually just another part of the model’s body. Even when the CG model’s “clothing” animates, it’s not a separate piece - it’s the same thing that we do to animate arms, legs, hair, fingers, eyes, or feet. The model’s clothing has the same animation skeleton driving it as the rest of the body.

In order to simulate removing of clothing, a lot of additional work actually has to be done. This is like trying to choreograph a very precise fight scene between actors and get them to “interact” but way more precise and complicated because it’s in 3D and they cannot touch each other. Instead of building just a character model, we would need to create and animate at least two separate models - the jacket and the jacketless character. Then we’d need to animate the jacket on the character such that it inherited the proper motion from the character and the entire process of the jacket being taken off by the character. This means synchronizing two separate and precise animations on two separate models that are located at different positions in 3D space, all with zero physicality. Both motions - the character and the jacket - must be precisely synchronized in order for it to work. If there’s any timing, angular, or spatial differences, things won’t look right. 

As you may have gathered, this is an awful lot of work for one single shot in one cutscene. Instead of doing it the hard way, we often use visual tricks like having two models - a jacketed model and an unjacketed model. Then we can have the character walk offscreen, show a close-up of a separate jacket model being put somewhere, and then model swap the character to an unjacketed version instead for the rest of the scene. Doing this kind of off-camera swap is actually significantly less work than it is showing the jacket-wearing character take the jacket off. Characters physically and visibly touching other characters or objects realistically in CG is one of the most expensive things in CG. This is why the entire game dev world was floored when we saw Ellie and Dina kiss in the Last of Us 2 E3 trailer - making that look good is really really hard.

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[nomediocre]

[gavinfoster]

[aaliyah-frank]

[moral-disorder]

Feeling like a real adult when online shopping for a bed frame and seriously considering the 800 dollar Australian made with Australian wood lifetime warranty option.

Just the idea of never having to buy another bed frame is so appealing. Most of the other options have 5 year max warranty.

There are many cheaper options. Mostly made of pine, with no indication of where the pine was grown or how it was farmed. And they are almost certainly manufactured overseas. But 800 is still not bad when compared to other non-pine options.

It's so much money. But I'm thinking its a really good option.

[sparklingxsoda]

A reward for myself 🥰

[writinghannibal]

The Scent of the Beast Himself

Since we have asked you to describe how you smell...

Hannibal has a sensitive sense of smell, and finds the scent of commercial detergents to be headache inducing. 

He has his clothing laundred in a ‘luxury’ brand hypoallergenic and scent free detergent.

He uses a triple-milled soap with charcoal and jojoba oil and a light lemongrass scent. He favors it because the scent fades quickly. The soap is milled in Marseilles. 

He uses Russian Amber Imperial shampoo. It smells of nettle, grapeseed, and rose water. 

When he does wear cologne, he wears Tom Ford Fucking Fabulous. Spicy, leathery lavender with hints of vanilla, amber and bitter almond and base noses of orris root and clary sage.

He has an animal-earthiness to his skin, though not unpleasantly so. His hands may sometimes smell of herbs, especially thyme and rosemary. His hands may also carry the subtle coppery scent of blood. 

In the mornings, he smells of fresh artisan coffee and toast made from homemade bread. When the weather is colder, it would not be unusual to catch the aroma of bergamont from the thermos he brings into the office. 

He favors natural fabrics that carry with them their own scents. His woolen overcoat is a particular favorite of his, and it retains after traces of the cologne he has worn along with its natural aroma of wool. 

He smells strongly of plastic when his life dictates he personally oversee the butchery of a pig outside of his home.