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Description
I'm not really sure what this is, to be honest with you.

Character render? Material show and tell? Who knows. I certainly don't.

It started out as a simple enough question- "can I replicate sequins in 3D?". I'd seen an IG model wearing something similar and thought it might look interesting on a slightly more curvaceous figure. I had an initial version of something working within a couple of hours, but it didn't feel right at all. The sequins didn't properly overlap as hexagonal patterns are wont to do, and I couldn't control how or where the sequins appeared nor was it possible to bias the angle of their reflections in a specific direction.

That eventually snowballed into a multi-day long obsessive exploration into hexagonal tiling, deterministic normal randomization, and a whole bunch of other crap that would take too long to type up here. The end result was more or less what you see above, which is an entirely procedural shader that relies on absolutely no external code (not even OSL) or custom texture generators to render. The sequins can be turned on and off as whole discs (rather than being partially cutoff by a mask texture), and it's possible to control every aspect of which direction they're pointing- including the ability to bias certain sequins in a specific direction to create a "rubbed" effect.

Oddly enough, this little project didn't stop there and somehow turned into "hey let's redo all the skin shaders and eyeball stuff" as well. I guess I just got tired of dealing with some rather boneheaded limitations due to the way things used to work, and finally decided to do something about it. That being said, I suppose this is really just the 2019 version of my base character rig (and by extension, "Vanessa"), since I really haven't actually touched any of that stuff since late 2018. In any case, I've still got a long way to go with a lot of this stuff (especially in regards to getting the character properly inflatable), but hopefully things look a bit better than they did before.

Description
I'm not really sure what this is, to be honest with you.

Character render? Material show and tell? Who knows. I certainly don't.

It started out as a simple enough question- "can I replicate sequins in 3D?". I'd seen an IG model wearing something similar and thought it might look interesting on a slightly more curvaceous figure. I had an initial version of something working within a couple of hours, but it didn't feel right at all. The sequins didn't properly overlap as hexagonal patterns are wont to do, and I couldn't control how or where the sequins appeared nor was it possible to bias the angle of their reflections in a specific direction.

That eventually snowballed into a multi-day long obsessive exploration into hexagonal tiling, deterministic normal randomization, and a whole bunch of other crap that would take too long to type up here. The end result was more or less what you see above, which is an entirely procedural shader that relies on absolutely no external code (not even OSL) or custom texture generators to render. The sequins can be turned on and off as whole discs (rather than being partially cutoff by a mask texture), and it's possible to control every aspect of which direction they're pointing- including the ability to bias certain sequins in a specific direction to create a "rubbed" effect.

Oddly enough, this little project didn't stop there and somehow turned into "hey let's redo all the skin shaders and eyeball stuff" as well. I guess I just got tired of dealing with some rather boneheaded limitations due to the way things used to work, and finally decided to do something about it. That being said, I suppose this is really just the 2019 version of my base character rig (and by extension, "Vanessa"), since I really haven't actually touched any of that stuff since late 2018. In any case, I've still got a long way to go with a lot of this stuff (especially in regards to getting the character properly inflatable), but hopefully things look a bit better than they did before.