Side Project: VN - Hot Water Title Screen (Patreon)

Yet another update from the Visual Novel I've been helping with, Hot Water. If you have any questions, feel free to ask!

We have here two new characters: Harriet and Hwa Young.

Harriet is from the main character's past in England. She followed him to Japan because she secretly has a crush on him. She's especially conflicted over her feelings for the main character, so she does her best to hide it from everyone.

Hwa Young is a Korean pop-star taking a break from the spotlight. After a stalker incident, her manager has a body-guard detail at nearly all times. While in town, she frequently visits the onsen to get away from the body-guards. She's interested in the main character because she sees him as an attractive man that is living a "normal" life, something she desires. In fact, her desire to win him over leads her to act somewhat like the stalker from her previous incident, with the goal of learning more about the main character so she can present herself as perfect.

While these are very rough character descriptions, the team working on it are constantly coming up with new ideas and trying to shape things up into something that will be excellent.

Now for a quick description of how we got this piece of art:

• Created turnaround images for each of these characters using OpenPose to get 6 distinct poses to get good details on clothing and face.
• Use the image as a reference in controlnet to generate one half of the image (in this case Hwa first) in the Onsen - luckily that worked really well
• Outpaint a new section using Harriet's turnaround pose as a reference - took quite a few to get right but it halfway worked - the face and body were off so...
• Edit the image to overlay the best matching turnaround pose image on top of the slightly wrong version from Outpaint
• Inpaint to blend the edited image of Harriet better
• Upscale the image a bit to give things a chance to better meld