Mixing Aristocratic elements and air with... Sling, Bikinis. Because why not? It's like a Reeses Peanutbutter Cup.
karami: I can't get over these outfits
karami: on Sinlen it's like sure whatever but on Naomi it's like, have some shame Naomi what are you doing
kayin: ahahaha sinlen just gets a pass?
karami: yeah we're used to her nonsense
kayin: Look it's the current fashion :)
karami: where
kayin: in Sling Bikini AU
karami: everyone in sling bikini AU is a sinner
Obviously there isn't a Sling Bikini AU, even if I might joke that there should be. There really is no wider context for this, but for vibe I was kinda going for "What if this was normal?" Naomi's cool, calm pose and her serious expression, paired with... that outfit. This definitely was a Naomi First picture. I didn't add Sinlen till later, though I think I spent the most time on her won the photoshop step. Speaking of which, someone asked me how I made this in Koikatsu.
Picture Process
A lot of work is pulled by the initial characters, who have all sorts of custom textures and blend shapes added to them, but even then I have to customize everything for each picture. My base character cards are designed with a "serious" body standard. There are artistic exaggerations still, but more in a general art sense where I'm assuming I'm not just going to use them for smut. Even if I end up mostly making lewd pics, this works out, because every lewd picture should be exaggerated differently.
(You can use your Arrow Keys to switch between pictures you zoomed in to, so you can switch back and forth and compare)
The first picture is with the custom bone modifications and blendshapes for this picture turned off. Obviously the body inflation is pretty intense. I tried to get some of this effect from just changing the camera FOV, but ultimately for an outfit like this, you want big squishy bodies. Unrealistically smaller heads kinda make everything look bigger and thicker. The jacket was the biggest pain as it didn't quite fit where it should and clipped terribly.
Problems like these are fixed in Blender. There is a great Koikatsu (and HS2) plugin, BlendshapeCreator I use a lot. I explore a baked version of the parts of the outfit I want to edit, with the body for reference, and I make blend shapes -- basically vertex offsets -- to fix the fit of the close. There can be all sorts of little headaches in this process and it's never perfect, so I try to basically overdo all my edits a bit and dial them in inside Koikatsu by tweaking the sliders. I also used Blender to paint the quilt texture. I knew I had to paint it because anything like a Sling Bikini is going to have messed up UVs that won't look good with a tiled texture slapped over it. Honestly you can tell from the blender screenshot texture isn't even that good. It doesn't have to be. It just has to be good enough for one picture.
I used NormalMap-Online to generate a normal map from the greyscale image to help the effect. Obviously this isn't going to generate a perfect normal, but for something like Koikatsu with cel-style shaders they don't have to be perfect. Honestly, it usually works fine for stuff like Honey Select or random Blender Projects as well.
With that done, I exported multiple versions of the shot. Outlines on and off, hard shading, soft shading, no shading... With combinations of these I can even use the Difference Blend Style to "extract" the lineart.
It isn't perfect but it's good enough to have a more traditional coloring workflow. A lot of my earlier edited pics worked through doing patches and paint overs and that's fine but has some limitations. The next deal is using the photoshop liquify tool to edit the picture's proportions. In this case, since I was working with multiple layered versions of the same picture, I exported the liquify mesh and used that to apply it to every picture.
Basically more exaggeration and a few fixes. Often I can also use the face tool to future refine expressions and stuff before doing some drawing over. From here it's just a matter of using masks to erase lines and shading I don't like and drawing in my own. At that point, that's just normal drawing stuff, which of course means a messy PSD with like 100 layers or whatever. Problem areas of note are jagged polygonal breasts and hips, and also clipping issues around the cravat and aglets. Parts of Sinlen's sling had to be fixed too. I also filled in any weird gaps I could in the line art, which is most visible in the hair. That said, I detailed almost everything on this one. It feels like my most successful "Fake 2D" picture so far, even though I didn't even set out to do that. It just seems to be an increasing result of thinking about and using 3d in a 2d process.
Instead of taking a bunch of screenshots from my photoshop file, honestly the best way to see the difference is for the usual End of Post Before-and-After slider.
