Hey-hey poly people.
I am working on a character in anime style. I am planning to make it look as hand drawn as possible, my direction for style is mostly "Jujutsu kaisen" and "Chainsaw Man" anime titles.
A little bit about workflow: it is directionless now, so expect a massive amount of triangles on a screen.I do mostly use them to make things keep
their shape as good as possible. Definitely not the most traditional
workflow, but here we are.
Character is planned to be in a low to mid poly range, and I don't plan to bake (much) normal maps. The reason for that is because I would like to texture it in Guilty Gear style with using texture atlas, so mostly flat colors + hand drawn style outlines, never done it before so learning something new. Might change though, depends if toon shader in unreal is going to act up or not.
Don't mind inconsistent tris amount on different objects, I am planning to change it in a future. Maybe.
Goals of the project:
- have a character in a hand drawn anime style
- keep a reasonable amount of polygons
- make a basic rig
- put it into unreal engine
- make a toon shader for it, make it as close as possible to look like anime
-not go nuts while I make it
Work in progress pictures, 3ds max viewport screen grabs for a while:
![Image: https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/5r/sdtdpoxnjeat.jpg](https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/5r/sdtdpoxnjeat.jpg)
Do note: face does not have custom edited normals, it is just two point lights with shadows + one light in front, nothing fancy. However I do plan to transfer normals from spherical-like object later to correct smoothing of shadows more. The rest will be handled in shader inside of Unreal.
![](https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/cq/rkdc57ianblx.jpg)
Face topology. Unlikely a subject to change, I might tweak shapes a little bit.
![](https://us.v-cdn.net/5021068/uploads/editor/ta/hl5n10ak7z77.jpg)
Hair mesh. That's in case seeing so many tris made you feel uneasy. Made by using splines with cross sections (yes I know it is possible to make it faster in blender). Yes, I will add more polygons into it.
If you have any kind of feedback, I do welcome it. Thank you.
Replies
Outfit is pretty much complete at this point, it is a zbrush BPR render.
Up close of a shirt
I also took time to adjust face a little bit.
I am changing plans with how I will go about final model, I am planning to retopo a character and bake normals. Just like the last time when I posted, I will be happy to hear critique and suggestions.
what i mean is, it looks like you started from a realistic shirt and reduced the resolution, but it still has a realistic shirt silhouette, and shapes read sort of like crumpled newspaper. If silhouette is just a few thoughtfully placed sharp creases and some flowing curves, it may feel more similar to what you'd see in hand drawn 2d.
tried to find some image, sorry this is real small but check out the silhouette of the sleeves. It's a straight or slightly curved tube, and just a few zig zags where it bends.
i've found it a lot easier to focus on this sort of thing if working with very low poly, only placing edges exactly where you need them, as opposed to starting from high resolution and trying to wrangle it into place.
The reason it looks like paper is because I used marvelous designer for cloth sim and dropped it into zbrush, and as much as I experimented, I feel like doing a sculpt by hand or just straight up making low poly first might be a better idea for this kind of style. I do want it to look as close as possible to hand drawn 2d art in the end.