MCS Fishnet - preview

• started working on the poll armor/outfit a couple of days ago. Will be doing it piece by piece as stated in the original poll post for it.

• as mentioned there, I've never done fishnets before and this is probably the item I was most interested in, so I started with it ... and I now finished it. I'll be using censored images here, I don't want to mess with however NSFW things work on Patreon.

  There's a couple of things I wanted to achieve with this item:

  1. I wanted the fishnet to be completely seamless (texture wise and design wise). Very often you'll get one of these and they'll usually have a big ugly seam, breaking the tileable pattern. Sometimes the authors will think of this and put some sort of a cloth "bar" where the seam goes to try and fake it. Some fishnet designs have that but of course, even with that, the pattern still doesn't match and is misaligned across the seams, even though it's at least a little less jarring. This generally happens because people just make a simple alpha plane and slap on a tileable texture on the UVs. It's very fast, but just not good enough visually.

     
     Well, easier said than done (or rather very time consuming, it's not THAT difficult), but I have achieved my goal here. These are completely and 100% seamless with a proper matching pattern. This is achieved by just modeling the whole thing out and having a proper highpoly to bake from. Because of the workflow used, this method also had the bonus of realistically deforming the fishnet in areas that are tighter, basically enlarging and shrinking the pattern by itself to mimic stretching. You'll notice that areas like the butt and thighs have bigger gaps when compared to the ankles for example, which is very nice.

  2. Distance from the body. I mentioned this before, but I hate it when things float unrealistically, whether it's stockings, pauldron armor, belts etc.. Sometimes it's unavoidable for rigging concerns, but in this case, a very close fit is possible without much issues. The vertex positions just have to match the underlying body perfectly and have the same weights so that they deform the same. End result is pretty much a very close fit without much floating. It is typically how tattoos/eyebrows etc are also done in games.

  3. I wanted some degree of a tight looking fit with some bulging skin. As such the body model was slightly modified across the waistband to have this. I didn't get a necessarily great result here, since the topology there doesn't fit this need, but still worth having. Aside from that, I also wanted skin bulging in between the fishnet across the legs. That was trickier, but I did also managed to achieve it:

     ingame shot

     There are some caveats here, it unfortunately didn't work exactly the way I wanted it to. Unfortunately there is no way to have custom normal maps for the body inside the fishnet nif, the game will just replace those with the default skin texture that the users has installed.

     Next, I tried to cheat by having a secondary transparent model/diffuse texture that had this bulging normal map assigned to it and just relying on the specular highlight to try and fake the bulging. Unfortunately while this worked, the effect just didn't have the intensity I required. This did have a side effect however, since I was able to control opacity of that bulge layer via material values, basically making it darker/lighter. I will be including this unplanned variation as an alternate item.

     darker fishnet variation

     So how is it that I have that bulging effect in those images ? Well I just replaced my regular body normal map with it. It's basically always on, is good just for taking some screenshots so it isn't being used dynamically whenever the fishnets are equipped. Quite disappointing, but it is what it is and I'm out of ideas for how else to make this work. Also that second layer has some nasty seams in it, since it's based on the original CBBE mesh and normals which weren't seamless (my manipulation also didn't help). You can probably see them if you pay attention in the above images. It could probably be fixed with a couple of tricks I haven't tried, but it not working the way I wanted kinda took the wind out of my sails here and my motivation. Still, I'll release the bulge normal map as a resource for people that want to at least mimic this effect.

• so yeah, all of this took like 5 days of messing about and experimenting ... instead of like 2-3 hours it could've taken if I did it like I described in goal#1. If you ever wandered why this shit takes so long and I go silent every once in a while ... there it is.

• one final thing, I'm not sure if I should make a panty for it, since the bottom is ... bare. It is technically part of a set and there's going to be jeans on top, but I am releasing it as a standalone item and it might be jarring without those. Then again, you can always use other panties ... ehh ... I'll decide tomorrow I guess; I'll release these as they are if I decide to skip the panties tomorrow or in 2 days if I model some. Doubt it's going to take more than a day to make panties, no freaking way, lol.