Sun-Kissed Aya

This winter has been a drag with the cold weather and shorter days. To cheer myself up, I've started transitioning over to using Koikatsu Sunshine and embracing its topical summer theme.

Reference image and Sunshine notes below the fold.

I really liked this pose when I saw it and knew I wanted to make my own variation using a futanari character. I changed up the camera angle to better frame the character and to work with the Koikatsu character skeleton. I also wanted to keep the character mostly in the sun so they remained the focus, even if this doesn't make a lot of sense when you see the baked lighting of the map I used.

A nice improvement with Sunshine is that the modding community has made some neat improvements to Chara Studio. You can now easily move things on a local axis which makes it easier to align elements with each other. And there's new tools for adding folders bound to objects using Node Constraints that can save a lot of time.

The tradeoff is that some features from Koikatsu didn't make the transition. The IBL shader groups don't work, which is what I used for a lot of my scenes to play with shadows and lighting. And the guides for the bone editor no longer render properly.

It'll take a bit of time to get used to the changes. But it has also been a long time since I've used this so maybe it is better that I'm coming into this at this time.