Sketch: More Bunny Egg

I've got round 1 of the materials finished.

You might notice the embroidery isn't as shiny on the new one (on your right) as the old.  That's intentional.  I was never quite happy with how it came out the first time.  I'll work on it some more, but first I want to gamma correct the materials.  Gamma Correction is the coolest discovery to hit Poserdom since MAT poses.  It's absence is responsible for the infamous distinctive "Poser murk".  As it turns out, a lot of the data Poser's rendering engine is outputting doesn't display correctly on a monitor.  Hell of an oversight there. :P  You can correct some of that in post, but what I've seen so far, having the engine do it (Poser Pro 2010) or doing it in materials gives results I like better.  It's the engineer in me; I rather get good data directly than massage bad data to something workable.

Oh, the feet there? Same deal as the ears; the soles are part of the same material zone as the legs.  I'm so proud of those, because that is three materials mixed together.  (33 nodes, if anyone's counting.  But I suspect some of those can be optimized out.)

It wasn't necessarily picked for this reason, but this project is actually a great one for learning the Matmatic compiler.  It touches on tons of the main concepts.  Once I finish him, I'll probably try to spend more time learning Python programming full out.  I want to learn it for other reasons, and it'll only help me with the shader building.

Excited nerd sketch

I'm working on rebuilding and improving the shaders* for the little Pysanky bunny-egg thing I did at Easter.  So far I've got the ears.




So why am I excited about the ears?  After all, they look basically the same.  Well, let me do some isoteric babbling that most people won't understand.  There's an important difference here.  The model on the left, I remapped so that the inner ear could be a different material than the outer ear.  On the model on the right, that's all done with a single shader that contains both the satin and the velvet.  It takes 9 extra nodes to do it just for this relatively simple case and would be more or less insane to assemble in Poser itself.

Luckily, someone built a compiler that lets you write materials in Python code, and then translates them into Poser nodes.  I'm working on learning it, and trying to learn shaders as well.  It allows you to combine separate materials into a single shader fairly easily, which will be even cooler for more complex situations.


* Properly speaking, they're actually materials.  Shaders are the pre-existing nodes they're built out of.  But that gets confused with the laymen definition of material, which would view the satin and the velvet separately.

(It's Ukrainian.  I looked it up.) 
(OK, I'm taking the internet's word for it that this means "Happy Easter".    It could actually be something really rude for all I know.)

As an extra Easter gift, here are some "tubes" (actually PNGs with transparent backgrounds) of the little bunny egg: the above image, one with the bunny-egg sitting, and one with him standing.  Enjoy!

Download Pysanky Bunny Pics



Pysanky Bunny Tubes 1 by Jinnayah is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.