Would you fap to this?

Jun 21, 2020
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Hi. So here's the thing: I am developing a game. I'm sure you probably read a lot about 80% of game devs that don't know how to code but do know how to draw and learn renpy to make a game, well... I'm in that other 20%. I know how to code, I've been a coder for some time now and I have zero problem in the programmatic part of a game, but when it comes to my artistic skills well, simply put: they are shit.
So to make things simple I developed a workflow (which I later learned is fairly common) in which I model a scene in daz studio and then use that scene as a base for drawing (so I don't have to deal with perspective/proportions). And it works fine, I've been playing around in Photoshop for like an hour or so and got this:
Susan Showering - Manual.png Susan Showering.png
It's supposed to be a woman showering (Left with soap). And I guess what I want to know is what's in the title: Would you fap to porn in that style? I know there's a LOT of room for improvement and I'd love to hear not only your honest feedback but also get some advice. For example, It would be great to know how to make better soap/wet body. Let me tell you "textures" are definitively what are proving to be more difficult to recreate for me, so again, any advice is more than welcome.
 
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RandyTyr

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The overall art style is something I'd be quite happy with if paired with an engaging setup that caters to my tastes contentwise. It definitely wouldn't be a downside to my enjoyment (as eg most Honey Select stuff is), and it's not something the market is flooded with either.

This concrete picture however puts me off. The soap on the left feels more like a discolouration of her skin to me. Maybe the artstyle isn't really suited for such detail? If you just keep the shampoo in her hair, that should be good enough (in particular if you actually include the shower).
 
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Yngling

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Honestly, the woman on the left looks like a cow...
That doesn't mean I won't fap but it could be better.
 
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The overall art style is something I'd be quite happy with if paired with an engaging setup that caters to my tastes contentwise. It definitely wouldn't be a downside to my enjoyment (as eg most Honey Select stuff is), and it's not something the market is flooded with either.

This concrete picture however puts me off. The soap on the left feels more like a discolouration of her skin to me. Maybe the artstyle isn't really suited for such detail? If you just keep the shampoo in her hair, that should be good enough (in particular if you actually include the shower).
Thanks for the feedback! I completely agree. I don't think I've said this in the post but for me it was an obvious decision to try and delivery the hardon/climax through dialogue and story (since, again, my artistic capabilities are close to zero) and have the visuals be more of an accompaniment.
Again, thank you for your honest opinion, there was something that put me off too! that's why I wanted to make the post. :ROFLMAO:
 
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Meaning Less

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As a tip, to work with textures on the skin like the shampoo you could instead use image layers with transparency and it will probably look better, it should also makeit a bit easier for you to trace the artwork since you can ignore those effects and then just layer them on top after.
 
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Coperic

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Not gonna say I would or I wouldn't, but I will say this. The fact that your art looks this good as a programmer shows that there's potential in your art skills. A lot of programmers cannot even draw a stick figure, the same as a lot of artists who cannot program "Hello World".

I could also say that you creating your own art is a step up to other developers who use Sims 4, Honey Select or Koikatu as assets. But other folks here had already said that. Good luck on your project!
 
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Count Morado

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If you've been on this site for any appreciable period of time (and by your join date, it appears you have) - you should already know that no matter what you put out (it could be stick figures or it could be the work of the masters) that there will be critics and fans. You just need to do what makes you happy and satisfied - we are our own worst critics and should always try to impress that nagging creature inside of us all. Outside of that, take everyone else's input with a grain of salt (including mine).

That said - Your example isn't too much different than https://f95zone.to/threads/corruption-time-v0-03c-filthysloth.72781/ and that still has a loyal base of fans even without any word from the developer in nearly 2 years.

It looks like you are taking whatever daz model and then using a 'cartoon' filter or reducing the number of colors and then lining the art by hand. I would suggest looking at other filters that could automate this process for you OR if you do want to do your line work by mouse/hand - select a different pen that has a little difference in width depending up stroke speed or other similar settings. I just did a quick search on Google - here's one artist's suggestions:

But asking a minority of people who post non-game threads on this site, of the minority of people who post on this site, of the minority of people who download from this site, of the minority of adult video game players is gonna skew your perspective of what works and what doesn't.
 
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Thank you, really! You do abide by what you say in your signature.


It looks like you are taking whatever daz model and then using a 'cartoon' filter or reducing the number of colors and then lining the art by hand. I would suggest looking at other filters that could automate this process for you OR if you do want to do your line work by mouse/hand - select a different pen that has a little difference in width depending up stroke speed or other similar settings. I just did a quick search on Google - here's one artist's suggestions:
This was really helpful. And yeah, I take the extra work to do the line art because, tbh, I didn't like how my 3d cartoon style ended up looking, so I switch to line art and I was more convinced with the direction it was going, and also I feel like it gives me more control over the final result.

But asking a minority of people who post non-game threads on this site, of the minority of people who post on this site, of the minority of people who download from this site, of the minority of adult video game players is gonna skew your perspective of what works and what doesn't.
And about this.. I didn't know it was like that. I thought I was supposed to ask this kinds of questions in here. I thought all people here were fellow lewd gamers :ROFLMAO:.

But again, thanks for the motivation. Keep it up, that I'm sure many people also need some!
 

EvolutionKills

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Jan 3, 2021
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Hi. So here's the thing: I am developing a game. I'm sure you probably read a lot about 80% of game devs that don't know how to code but do know how to draw and learn renpy to make a game, well... I'm in that other 20%. I know how to code, I've been a coder for some time now and I have zero problem in the programmatic part of a game, but when it comes to my artistic skills well, simply put: they are shit.
So to make things simple I developed a workflow (which I later learned is fairly common) in which I model a scene in daz studio and then use that scene as a base for drawing (so I don't have to deal with perspective/proportions). And it works fine, I've been playing around in Photoshop for like an hour or so and got this:
View attachment 2627581 View attachment 2627596
It's supposed to be a woman showering (Left with soap). And I guess what I want to know is what's in the title: Would you fap to porn in that style? I know there's a LOT of room for improvement and I'd love to hear not only your honest feedback but also get some advice. For example, It would be great to know how to make better soap/wet body. Let me tell you "textures" are definitively what are proving to be more difficult to recreate for me, so again, any advice is more than welcome.

I would not. That's not very appealing looking.

If you have Daz3D, I'm going to assume you have some sort of work PC. Okay. So even if you don't want to do the typical 3D renders with ray-traced lighting that are super render intensive, there are other options.

I mean, the go to would be to pick one of the Illusion games as a basis. They're all built in Unity and are intended to run in real-time, so they're not bogged down with computational intensive lighting engines. Those that have been around longer, like the first Honey Select, have a very robust mod community and are capable of some pretty fan-fucking-tastic visuals with enough effort. The point being that while they might require work and effort, none of that is teaching yourself how to draw or digitally paint.

Even if you stick with 3D, you could try other rendering methods? I don't know what options Daz3D has, but in more general purpose 3D rendering programs (e.g. Blender, 3D Studios Max) are capable of a wide variety of rending options. Cell-shading is a thing.

If you don't mind going for a more abstract look, Photoshop filters can add a layer to the visuals. Whether that's to break the colors down into distinct gradients or attempt to make it look like it was painted by Van Goegh. If you're not comfortable with drawing digitally (and especially if you don't have some sort of digital pen/tablet) and aren't familiar with whipping out vector graphics quickly, I'd probably focus on a workflow that could offload more of the image generation work onto the machine, and try to be creative by adjusting the knobs and levers.
 
Jun 21, 2020
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If you don't mind going for a more abstract look, Photoshop filters can add a layer to the visuals. Whether that's to break the colors down into distinct gradients or attempt to make it look like it was painted by Van Goegh. If you're not comfortable with drawing digitally (and especially if you don't have some sort of digital pen/tablet) and aren't familiar with whipping out vector graphics quickly, I'd probably focus on a workflow that could offload more of the image generation work onto the machine, and try to be creative by adjusting the knobs and levers.
I get this, but I'm kinda new to Photoshop and I have even tried using filters, like you said, before attempting to making that image with line art, I just didn't like the result, so I ended up with what I got. Although, to be fair, I know there must be a perfect combination of filters/settings that will get me to the cartoony style I'm looking, I just couldn't find it yet.

I use the line art version just because it gives me a lot of freedom to create a scene. But it is true that it also requires more work and, as you said, I'd love to relegate that work onto the machine using a predefined set of filters for every image and leave to me the tweaking of what I don't like. I just don't know where to start, and trying every combination of filters is not an option (not only because of the amount of filters there are that stack up the combinations, but also because you can put the same filters overtop of the others and it changes again, so that literally creates an infinite amount of combinations).

Here is where am at rn (haven't work on it too much, just trying to get the wet hair right until I get a wet hair asset to reference). I removed the soap because I agree it looked weird, and also the extreme lighting filter I had put on her (that was intended to make her skin look wet, but it ended up looking like skin discoloration like you can see in the original post).
Susan Showering (2).png
Again, what I'm working on is her hair (I feel it could be done better; maybe with shading? because notice how it's the only part of her that doesn't have shades).
And also the "wetness" which I think I know how to do: I studied a little about how we, as humans, know that something is wet just by looking at it. And I ended up noticing how water molecules reflect light and how it makes something wet (covered in water drops) shine when light shines upon it. So maybe if I can simulate water drops reflecting light all over her body/hair, maybe I'll end up with a more realistic showering scene, which is why I'm going though all this trouble anyways :ROFLMAO:.
But also I could reuse this technique to simulate sweat when working out.

Anyways, I don't wanna get hung up on this. So if you know of any Photoshop magical filter combination that can get me from a 2d render to something similar to the above, it would be of great help to speed up this process. By avoiding the hand-drawing grind, I wouldn't mind putting up the extra work into making more renders and even animating with many frames + some frame interpolation AI to create some smooth animated scenes.
 
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EvolutionKills

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I get this, but I'm kinda new to Photoshop and I have even tried using filters, like you said, before attempting to making that image with line art, I just didn't like the result, so I ended up with what I got. Although, to be fair, I know there must be a perfect combination of filters/settings that will get me to the cartoony style I'm looking, I just couldn't find it yet.

-snip-

Anyways, I don't wanna get hung up on this. So if you know of any Photoshop magical filter combination that can get me from a 2d render to something similar to the above, it would be of great help to speed up this process. By avoiding the hand-drawing grind, I wouldn't mind putting up the extra work into making more renders and even animating with many frames + some frame interpolation AI to create some smooth animated scenes.

Okay, well, if you do want to go for a cartoon style cell-shading? If that is the goal, rather than something you're just settling on? Then you definitely can do that at the render level, and you absolutely should do that. Genuine toon-shading or cell-shading can't be done with a simple Photoshop filter. I know for a fact that more robust and general purpose 3D modeling and rendering programs can do it, and a quick Google search for 'toon shading in Daz3D' brought up a link to their resource store where you can just purchase a working toon-shader for it.



11-sketchy---toon-edge-and-art-style-shaders-for-iray-daz3d.jpg

12-sketchy---toon-edge-and-art-style-shaders-for-iray-daz3d.jpg

Now that is built around nVidia's Iray tech, so is gonna require one of their GPU's and probably a not insignificant amount of GPU grunt depending on how you setup a scene. Again, the export resolution and the complexity of the lighting solution would be the major determining factor to your render time here. I kinda doubt you're going to be doing a lot of procedural physics simulations. Using less complex lighting and lesser density mesh models with smaller textures and simplified material properties will also reduce render time.

Also with this pre-packaged option here you are just paying for convenience. If you don't have a nVidia GPU and don't mind watching some tutorials on how to import 3D models and rigs and how to setup some lighting and shaders? You could do all of this with any GPU in any mainstream general purpose 3D model and render application. Plus if you did jump to another render tool, like Blender or such, they tend to be super well documented. Type 'Blender tutorial' into YouTube and you can watch stuff for days without end.



Also, as someone who studied animation at the college level (Game Art & Design, Art Institute of Pittsburgh), let me give you my boilerplate warning about doing animation poorly. Okay, so there is this thing called the . Human empathy response scales with something's likeness to being human, the more human it is the more easily we can empathize with it (this is why Wall-E has 2 big camera eyes and they move like eyebrows to help convey emotions). But there is a phenomenon where once you get close too close to being human, without being human enough, and the empathy response nosedives. This effect, when portrayed as a line graph, looks like a sharp valley, with the empathic response rising again as you get closer to a healthy human being. The valley consists of creepy androids, zombies, and human prosthetics. It is also inhabited by anything that attempts photorealism without the animation to match. This has even cropped up in major Hollywood films like Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, The Polar Express, and Beowulf. That is because animation magnifies the effect, both making less-human beings more empathetic (the aforementioned Wall-E is a good example), but it also can further highlight just how inhuman something actually is (think shambling zombies). Animation is, therefore, a double edged sword.


the-uncanny-valley-1.jpg


The more inhuman you are, the more leeway you're gonna have. If you're working with a heavily caricaturized human model like you'd see in Pixar's The Incredibles, they work much better with a more classical exaggerated 'Disney' style of animation. Even if the animation is poor, you won't get the same creepiness backlash with it as you would a photorealistic model. Now just slapping a toon-shader on a model otherwise intended to be photorealistic? Probably not going to get you much wiggle room. If your animation isn't top notch, it's going to look creepy and weird. No amount of AI interpolation can fix bad keyframes. There is no 'Easy Button' to make good animation. Even motion capture data is a starting point, not the end product. So you really should think long and hard on if you want to commit the time, effort, end energy to doing it right; of if that all would be better spent on just honing your still shot composition instead.


I'm not joking. Look at the VN Crimson High if you want a crash course on creative use of scene and shot composition. It's basically the only Koikatsu Party based game that I like, and it's because the dev took the time to make pretty good looking and visually distinct models that hold up well at all angles (or at least the one they're willing to show the audience). They really shine in dialogue scenes where you can see what a character thinks or feels by their nonverbal reaction to the ongoing conversation. They often have large groups of characters carrying on a conversation, and the writer never needs to step aside and tell the audience what such-and-such character thought about what was just said, cause you can just see their reaction to it. Instead of using up their development time and energy doing animations, they've instead plotted out an entire shot sequence for a given conversation in order from start to finish, so they they can convey the flow of the conversation visually just as much as they can narratively. It takes a lot more work than just going back and forth with a shot/reverse-shot, or just zooming in on a single character's head like you're trapped in a Bethesda RPG, but it pays major dividends. It takes effort and dedication, but what you don't have to do is teach yourself the fundamentals of animation.

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EvolutionKills First of all, THANKS! You put so much effort in your reponses and I'm truly for that, I just had to say it.

Also, as someone who studied animation at the college level (Game Art & Design, Art Institute of Pittsburgh), let me give you my boilerplate warning about doing animation poorly. Okay, so there is this thing called the . Human empathy response scales with something's likeness to being human, the more human it is the more easily we can empathize with it (this is why Wall-E has 2 big camera eyes and they move like eyebrows to help convey emotions). But there is a phenomenon where once you get close too close to being human, without being human enough, and the empathy response nosedives. This effect, when portrayed as a line graph, looks like a sharp valley, with the empathic response rising again as you get closer to a healthy human being. The valley consists of creepy androids, zombies, and human prosthetics. It is also inhabited by anything that attempts photorealism without the animation to match. This has even cropped up in major Hollywood films like Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, The Polar Express, and Beowulf. That is because animation magnifies the effect, both making less-human beings more empathetic (the aforementioned Wall-E is a good example), but it also can further highlight just how inhuman something actually is (think shambling zombies). Animation is, therefore, a double edged sword.

-graph

The more inhuman you are, the more leeway you're gonna have. If you're working with a heavily caricaturized human model like you'd see in Pixar's The Incredibles, they work much better with a more classical exaggerated 'Disney' style of animation. Even if the animation is poor, you won't get the same creepiness backlash with it as you would a photorealistic model. Now just slapping a toon-shader on a model otherwise intended to be photorealistic? Probably not going to get you much wiggle room. If your animation isn't top notch, it's going to look creepy and weird. No amount of AI interpolation can fix bad keyframes. There is no 'Easy Button' to make good animation. Even motion capture data is a starting point, not the end product. So you really should think long and hard on if you want to commit the time, effort, end energy to doing it right; of if that all would be better spent on just honing your still shot composition instead.
This is just great, I was familiar with the term and its general meaning, but I never bothered to look it up and learn about it, but you just gave me a great warning and lesson about animation and character design in general that I don't think I'd find so easy even if I knew what I was looking for. Thank you!

Miko, the girl currently speaking, is the one with white hair and is talking about the previous night she spent with the MC. What do the other girls think about what she just said? Well, look at their faces. The blond Orianna has an attentive look on her face, because she's giving Miko all of her attention, and is both too naïve and new to the group to not take Miko at her word or have dirty thoughts. Rocking the blue hair is Kagome, who has a lascivious look on her face, cause she doesn't think Miko is telling the whole truth and her head is perpetually in the gutter. The redhead Kana looks skeptical and annoyed, because while she too thinks Miko isn't being forthright, it stems from her jealousy at Miko getting closer to the MC.
And this... I've been reading a lot about it, and many brought it up under another post I made about game dialogue writing. And I completely agree that following the rule "show, don't tell" can lead to some great scenes in general. In that post I talked about how I don't like when devs show you the NPC's thoughts because for me it breaks immersion, and blah blah. And this way of showing feelings though facial/body expression came up as a viable solucion to avoid that and unnecessary narration.
 
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Also, just as an update, I've been working on the background of the bathroom a little bit using a photo of a real bathroom and playing around with some of your recommendations, and got to this:
Batroom Scene1.png
Of course it has a lot of improvement to be made (like shadows, for example, she is floating in there for now), and I would love to get your feedback. I'm spending so much time designing this scene/girl just to create a defined art style and know how to move forward with the rest.