The making of the A day to remember wallpaper

A few of you have expressed an interest in seeing a time lapse or something of me making a wallpaper, but because I kept switching back and forth between production and making this wallpaper, it became a bit of an editing nightmare, so instead I'm gonna try and zoom in on a detail of this month's wallpaper and talk a little about that.

So, in keeping with approaching Halloween, the theme for this month's wallpaper is Dia de Los Muertos. For those that don't know it, it's a festival from Mexico and several other Latin countries, where the beloved dead are remembered, and it's not a moment of sadness (or not of just sadness), but of celebration and joy as well. An very noticeable visual part of it is the sugar skull make-up that is featured in this wallpaper, which I think looks incredibly cute and sweet on a woman. 

Naturally, I really wanted to get that part of it right, and naturally, it turned out to be some of the most troublesome work in this render.

As a basis for the sugar skull make-up, I procured this lovely Daz character called Rosita a while back while she was on sale, as she came with some nice make-up. 

However, straight off the bat, I encountered a problem here, because the make-up was in fact implemented as part of her skin, which is to say they put a texture map in there of this characters facial skin, and painted the make-up straight on top of it. 

That looks something like this:

That meant I couldn't use it as is, because even if the face was mostly covered in make-up, it would still cause a color difference where the face meets the neck and back of the head, and some other, subtle things might be off as well. I won't bore you with the details, but skins in daz3d are comprised of a lot of maps that apply things like small feature and blemishes, skin translucency and glossiness, etc., so it's best to work with the characters own skin instead of a different one I feel.

With basic Paintshop skills, it's easy enough to cut out the makeup bits. So attempt one, cut out the makeup, superimpose on the facial skins of Macy and Denise, and good to go.

Well, not quite. It still need to have a bit of a white base. Kit bashing 101: look through the stuff you have to see what you can use. Luckily, I picked up this excellent body paint asset (Aki body paints) the other day when making the dinosaur wallpaper. 

It's by an artist called AeonSoul, who does (or do, I'm note sure if it's a team or not) some amazing work, and this one has this great looking facial smear that gives off a nice skull vibe. That looks something like this.

So, we have Macy's facial skin, we superimpose the smear of white, superimpose the makeup, and we have something like Rosita's skin tailored to Macy.

Except, it's not looking so great. 

It's faint and translucent. Turns out that unlike Rosita, a great deal of the skin color for Macy and Denise comes from subsurface effects. What that does is model what the tissue looks like just below the skin, so you get a nice, realistic looking translucency effect. But it also means I can't apply color to that, because it'd look like the color was inside the skin, and that's not a good look for makeup that's supposed to go on top.

So, time for a different approach, and it's the body paint pack to the rescue some more. It uses geo-shells (basically, a thin layer draped on top of the model's surface, closely following their skin) to add the body paint to the model, which means it's completely separate from the skins, and it's already designed to look like something applied on top. Perfect. 

So, first a geo-shell with the skull-smear, then a second one with the makeup coloring in it.

The white smear is looking great, except maybe a little to rough but that's just fiddling with some strength values to reduce the bumps and ridges. But the color on top looks kinda sucky. It's featureless, smooth and opaque, and it's clashing with all the subtle things happening in that white base. 

But we can fix that, so it's time to bring this home. 

First, let's start out by adding a more translucent white base for the entire face/neck to give the effect of a full face make-up, and tweak the strength of the bumps and ridges so it looks a little smoother and finer, like make-up instead of mud. 

Skull smear on top, also a little smoother this time.

Them, let's get some translucency around the eyes for the color bit. The skin around the eyes has many different features that are all hidden now, making it look bland, so letting some of those shine through will make it look a whole lot better. We can do that by fiddling with the cutout maps which kinda looks like this:

Now we have this, which is pretty good, and the eyes look great But the shell with the make-up is still looking a little like it's stuck on top of the white base, instead of being part of it. 

The white make-up has maps that add ridges bumps and glossy bits and dull bits to it, and if we copy all of those out to the color make-up shell, we're giving that bit a feel like it's part of that white base instead of stuck on top (if you have a hard time spotting it, look at the black bit on the nose). 

So there we have it. Macy and Denise in sugar skull make-up.

Of course, there's a ton of other customizations in that wallpaper, from the tweaking of the candles to getting wine to look like pulque (as it turns out, the secret ingredient was cum), getting a confetti asset to scatter marigold petals or even actually getting marigold flower models, and that's not even going into the challenges of customizing the outfits. But that's for another time.