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[FINISHED!] Tsukumogami

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BlueChaos polycounter lvl 2
[Edit from August 2024, found a name for this project!]

Hey all! New project, following some advice from a mentor :] 

I'm planning on sculpting this to make my portfolio feature more zbrush sculpts! 
Concept is by me for once :D The bulk of the sculpting will be the guts, and the hands.


The first few days, I got a basemesh going in Maya. I can't quite remember how long it took me, but I decided to take the time and make a hand basemesh which turned out better than I thought. I hope it will be useful!




I really wanted to run this basemesh through some critiques, but couldn't really find who to ask. So please, if you have anything to say, go ahead! I want the anatomy to be perfect perfect, besides stylised proportions. It's only a basemesh, but if there's anything already looking weird, I'd love to know

In the mean time, I'll start sculpting :D 

Catch ya later, probably today!

-Blue

Replies

  • BlueChaos
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    BlueChaos polycounter lvl 2
    An hour and a half later, I managed to whip this up!



    I'm somewhat happy with this already, but I'll try and look at more references to get these as accurate as possible. After correcting the anatomy and proportions, I'll add the very tiny details like wrinkles, as well as nails, and fuse the fingers to the hands finally, then make a clean cut at the wrist and decide to add bones or not.

    Can anyone tell me if they spot anything weird/ wrong please 👉👈 I currently can't ask anyone for feedback so I only got this place, it would be very much appreciated.

    Catch you later!

    Blue
  • carvuliero
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    carvuliero hero character
    What's wrong with the poor creature ?
    First if you are going to sculpt so many different hand gestures I suggest to start with few hand studies while keeping everything simple and boxy
    Id say rib cage is not long enough leaving big gap between rib cage and pelvis . hand proportions and gestures are all off , dont try to invent them just look at your hand lol . In concept she is twisting a lot and I  don't get that feel from your block out
    Also find some rhyme or reason for why hands are where they are

  • BlueChaos
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    BlueChaos polycounter lvl 2
    Thank you so much for taking the time to comment and critique so thoroughly carvuliero!



    I'm a bit sad this does not communicate the feeling I wanted people to feel, they're not supposed to look miserable. I suppose I need some more practice!

    The message I had posted above was supposed to showcase a sort of rough study, I suppose the quality is not there either then, do you suggest I just make 5 more of these before jumping in? Using my own hand as reference, or anatomy books?
    To clarify, I've done all the hand poses present with my own hand to make sure they made sense (gesture wise, not proportion wise. I'll admit the proportions were rushed) 

    As for the big thigh gap, is it ok if I don't include it? I might be wrong but I feel like it makes the character too thin for my liking.



    I'll take the time to study everything you included in your critique for sure, I can already see how it will help in improving this massively. :] Thank you again!
    Next post will be focused on correcting everything.

    If any other kind person has something to say, please go ahead! As said previously, I want to make the anatomy really accurate and pleasing to look at. Thank you in advance  <3
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Edit: I sorted through the feedback and made a plan of attack. Putting it here so I don't forget

    HANDS:
    1) do more 3d hand studies before jumping in 
    2) make a hand drawn diagram of what you find out
    3) have the positions in space make more sense. draw out the invisible arm connections and line them up. but also, consider arcs.
    4) when seen from above, wrist should be thinner than palm of the hand. fingers align with the palm.
    5) on the hand, middle right, thumb base and thumb should be bigger.
    6) same hand, consider arcs.
    7) on the hand, middle left, the position could be more natural. Take the pose and reference.
    8) hand bottom left, the thumb should be more forward.

    HEAD:
    1) fix the hair on the head to look more accurate to concept
    2) place the eyes.
    3) make the head look less shit from the side
    4) think about the suggested twist. It's not present on concept but probably looks nicer

    TORSO PIECE (torso belly hips legs):
    1) rib cage twist, I'm conflicted. Discuss possibilities.
    2) longer, thinner rib cage
    3) higher trapezius.
    4) define the clavicle more
    5) add pectoralis connection to the arm. i'll admit i wanted to do it during the sculpt but it can be added now
    6)  add the rib cage middle bones as future reference (sternum, possibly ribs as well)
    7) add the additional hole meant to represent the heard symbolically
    8) groin shape. Better luck doing this in sculpt but I can attempt doing it hard surface
    9) thigh shapes, especially inwards 
    10) think about thigh gap.
  • carvuliero
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    carvuliero hero character
    I think most useful will be to do few simplify hands so you can commit to memory major forms and planes then will be easy to pose them the way you like
    Below is example with few different level of complexity , doent matter how simple actually is as long as you can learn forms and planes
    "To clarify, I've done all the hand poses present with my own hand to make sure they made sense (gesture wise, not proportion wise. I'll admit the proportions were rushed) "
    :: Then you should push the pose or look closely to your hands :)  People talk with their hand try some acting also use a mirror to see the back side

    "As for the big thigh gap, is it ok if I don't include it? I might be wrong but I feel like it makes the character too thin for my liking."
    :: That will depends wider hip -> legs far apart ,skinny legs will make the distance appear even bigger pose matter too , my drawing was to show that legs doesnt start at the middle
    Use your own hands its all you need just have to switch  to form and plane mode and ignore everything else and if you have anatomy for sculptors there some nice collection useful tips
    Maybe check Robert Liberace he leaves really cool ghost like movement effect in his paintings

  • BlueChaos
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    BlueChaos polycounter lvl 2
    Long time no see!
    Due to some real life stuff I wasn't able to post for a while. I've been studying anatomy a lot on paper past month, and I really needed it!

    I still don't have much to post concerning this project, besides the fact that I attempted to pose a skeleton inside, (Thank you Fabricio Works!) to see if things made sense.
    I'm not quite sure if it looks believable, but there's definitely some underlying issues with the way I had my model originally.

    When the skeleton is done, I'll start layering muscles :]



    (The head is so huge!!)

    Blue
  • BlueChaos
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    BlueChaos polycounter lvl 2
    Hey all!

    I had completely stashed this project to the side, because it intimidated me a lot. Instead of leaving it in forever hiatus because I'm not at the level I want to be, I just decided to get into it, even if it's not perfect, and tweak it along the way!

    I still tried to use past feedback of course, and it proved massively helpful. Thank you so much carvuliero! B)

    Here are a few screenshots of the current state. I decided to start with a symmetrical model instead of asymmetrical, for reasons you can imagine.




    I've already started working on the gears that will be present on the face, but I believe next step will be to merge the horn base with the facial pattern, either that or start working on the hollow in her body as to not get too lost into details.

    Please let me know if you have any thought, whether it would be about bad design, anatomy, future ideas etc!! I love to hear it all :]

    (Last thing I wanted to note for future reference, I read up on a technique called "primitive blocking" on Twitter the other day, it's the best!! I think I will use it forever. Have a good day!)
  • carvuliero
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    carvuliero hero character
    Small suggestion that usually do miracles for me Extend her legs fix pelvis area and delete what you don't need

  • BlueChaos
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    BlueChaos polycounter lvl 2
    Worked a bit more today :]

    Here's a list of what i tackled!

    >extended the things, following carvuliero's advice. I'll trim them later!



    > detailing the horn base
    This proved a bit harder than expected, I wanted to add additional sculpted on rings, but the result wasn't as satisfactory as the clean shapes I can get with primitive sculpting.
    I went ahead and added the little tendrils coming out of the horn base, and don't know how I feel about them so far. They definitely add something to the silhouette, but also they feel out of place, as they don't have other elements to echo their shape currently.

    > create clean hollows for the eye cavities
    The future eyes are planned to be transparent, almost like frosted glass.
    I achieved a clean hollow shape by duplicating the eyes, scaling them a little, and the using live booleans. It was easier than expected!



    >create a clean hollow for the torso and heart
    I had planned to do this later as this would break symmetry, but when playing around with live booleans, I thought it could be tackled now since it's a dynamic system!
    I have yet to figure out how to create the metal wire border around it, in a way that looks good, convincing, and regular in width.
    I also want to play around with this shape more before tackling what will be inside. I would like it to look like it has a beveled border.



    > merge horn base with face growth
    I had a plan to add perpendicular shapes to merge the two together, but when I tried, it didn't turn out. So instead of this, I added rings to the face growth, to have the two objects merge together visually. I will leave the rest of the growth free of details, so things aren't too cramped.
    With this I believe the face and horn are at the level of detail that I want. I will leave them alone for now



    >fix up the anatomy
    I had a friend help me with a critique, which was super nice of him!! Following his advice, I tweaked a few things. It may have been a bit late to work on such profound changes, but better late than never!

    >>1 neck tilt, and whole body position in side view
    One tip that really helped me during this, is that the collarbone and the start of the legs shouldn't be aligned! the collar bone starts far back, to the same point as the middle of the thigh.
    The model I used also had the deltoid tiled back a little, and not flat the way I had it.
    Pushing the torso back and the pelvis forward helped a lot in making everything else look better too, including the stomach and guts area that looked odd before.
    (I later tweaked the legs to make them reach further back, which removed the feeling of lack of balance.)



    >> 2 the shoulder blade area.
    The top of it was too rounded and visible, it was not well connected to the deltoid. The area also looks better with the spine more apparent.



    >>3 rework the clavicle area.
    The "u" shape was very pronounced. I decided to change it for something more natural looking.





    That will be it for today! Please let me know if you see anything i should fix that's not listed below.



    TO DO:
    -add some bones sticking out from the wrists, arm and thighs.
    -create a bevel on the torso cavity
    -create the organs/bones in the hollow

    -detail/figure out the hair strands more. positioning is good for now, but some don't look good.
    -retouch the ear. It's not as refined as the face
    -import gears, and place them on the face (currently the face has enough detail)

    -create clean outlines for the torso and other pieces (i will probably try this in maya or blender
    -think about making more hands, it might be cooler if they all had different poses.


    (´▽`ʃ♡ƪ)





  • Michael Knubben
    I feel like the sculpt got thinned out a lot, and you lost a little bit of the strong shapes you had in the lowpoly blockout. Really cool concept though, looking forward to where you take it!
  • BlueChaos
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    BlueChaos polycounter lvl 2
    Thank you for the feedback Michael!
    I do agree that some of the nicer shapes got lost, at the moment I'm not sure how to retrieve them or what to do about it.
    If l’m analysing things correctly, there's a balance to strike between an anatomically correct sculpt, and stylisation (and that's what I'll have to play with). I'll have to think about what to do for sure, thank you for pointing it out :)
  • Fabi_G
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    Fabi_G high dynamic range
    Hi! I feel making the cutout deeper will make for a more extreme midsection. The cutout of the lower body could then be shaped similar to a bowl, on the torso accentuate the lats/ribcage. Bringing back some counterpoise would increase dynamism. Rough overpaint:
    Keep it up!
  • BlueChaos
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    BlueChaos polycounter lvl 2
    That sounds like a great idea Fabi-G!
    Thank you for taking the time to overpaint, the effect is really convincing. It would also bring things closer to the concept art, so double win!
    As for the counterpoise, I'm still intending to work with symmetry for now so if that's alright, I will add it later when rigging :D it looks so good in your rendition, I'll try hard to make it look just as good!
  • BlueChaos
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    BlueChaos polycounter lvl 2
    Hey all! I managed to do two things today,

    First of all I got a sketch going for the ribs, and what will be the heart. I honestly like the way the ribs look already, so I might leave them as is.


    Next up I played around with how to do the bevel on the chest cavity for a long time before figuring things out with live booleans. On the chest cavity subtool I masked the area I wanted to be more deep than the cavity, and created a new subtool from this. It looks a bit more man-made now, which is what I was aiming for.  I'm expecting it to look better with the future metallic border around the cavity as well.


    Lastly I went ahead and tried detailing the hair a bit more. This was definitely a time sink which I regret quite a bit, but at least it's done! I spent a while fixing some intersections that were looking rough as well.

    If anyone here has tips on how to make better stylised hair without the use of hair cards for now, I'd be really interested! Definitely the hardest part of the workflow for me so far.


    Even if it doesn't look like a lot, that'll be it for today!

    Next up, I still have to:

    -Finish detailing the hair strands that need it, but shouldn't go overboard
    -sketch up how I want the ears to actually look, they aren't satisfactory for now. (lacking some secondary and tertiary details)
    -apply changes to the ears

    -sketch up exactly how I want the future organs to look, as well as the heart. If I leave them as plain as in the concept, they will be bland.
    -block out the organs

    -add some bones sticking out from the wrists, arm and thighs. (I have to research how they look at the cutting angles I chose, even if I'm planning for things to be stylised like the ribs)

    -import gears, and place them on the face

    -make more hand poses

    In maya later before I start the retopo:
    -create clean outlines for the torso and other pieces (i will probably try this in maya or blender


    ( *︾▽︾) see you

  • BlueChaos
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    BlueChaos polycounter lvl 2
    Hey all!
    Today, some paintover + concept art, to understand where I wanted to go in the future with this.

    Included are ideas from the original concept art but a little more refined, some changes to previously modelled things, and some new elements I want to include.

    Notably I want the metal bands around the hands, thighs and torso cavity to be a lot wider.



    Currently unsure about the porcelain patterns, they're only temporary and will be done in texture anyway, but I wanted to get a general look of where things would be going! It was a very insightful decision.
    (I also want to note that colour calibration is still an issue on the tablet I used and I did not think to do colour tests before calling it a day, so the following images are more desaturated than intended.)

    If anyone has feedback or ideas about this design/the changes I'd be eager to hear it! I recognise that my choice are not to everybody's taste but still want to make this piece as appealing as possible, so don't hesitate to mention anything you don't like and why, even if it's subjective.




    Cheers! :]







  • Taetravis
    Blue!!! this is dope i love the concept i also like the steampunk,skeleton vibe of it do you plan on adding any clothing or any jewelry? and also what's with all the hands is that different hand ideas? or does  the creature have all those hands? 
  • BlueChaos
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    BlueChaos polycounter lvl 2
    Hey Teatravis!! Thank you so much for the kind words, it's super encouraging! 😊
    I don't plan on adding clothing so far, as it never came to mind when doing the concept or the sculpt.
    As for jewellery, I plan on adding quite a bit of metal already. If some areas end up too plain I might revisit the idea, thank you so much for suggesting it!
    The hands are part of the character itself yes, but stylistically the seem a little too different from the main body I'll talk about this at the end of this message :D

    The idea behind multiple sets of hands is both borrowed from depictions of hindi deities, and inspired from the multiple sets of hands that often come with pose-able figurines, like Nendoroids, or even simply ball jointed dolls!
    That's also the reason why the character is so disjointed, it's meant to remind the viewers of the joints some custom dolls might have.
    I hope it makes more sense with some context!


    Here's an update alongside this reply.
    I've been quiet for the past few days as I wanted to be less spammy, but I think it's been long enough, so here is what I've been working on!

    I modified the ears to fit the paint over, and finished detailing the hair, putting a focus on speed.
    Less notably, I placed the cuts on the arms and thighs where I wanted them with booleans so I can move them around if they don't work out later.
    I then placed rudimentary shapes for the sticky-out bones, one for the humerus, and each hand received two bone tips, one for the ulna and one for the radius.


    I then was in a Maya mood, and created the missing gear pieces for the head, as well as the chains for the horn bauble, and the heart (low poly, high poly and base uvs.)

    I'll assemble things in Maya as planned, after the retopology.


    I also took some time to start on the organs! They were a little plain by only following the concept, so I added some more sprout like things, sourced directly from the horn growth for a feeling of unity. This might need some more tweaking, but I'll handle that a bit later if I notice problems.


    That's it for today! Here's a list of what I still have to do next :]

    -make the plants inside the cavity.. maybe in maya for the stem part? I feel like maya is better for tube-like stuff.
    -figure out what to do about the chest cavity booleans. They are making my computer lag, so applying them might be good, i feel happy with their shape.
    -make more hand poses, maybe
    Tangent: I need to think of what to do about the hand stylisation. Currently I think it's interesting that they're more detailed than the body, it gives creepy vibes which I personally appreciate, but I don't want it to be too off-putting.
    Solution: so far the porcelain body is simple, while the blue growth is detailed, so the hands could be blue. I thought about this for a few days and think it might be a good

    -retopology

    -place the horn jewelry
    -place the gears on the face
    -place the heart, tweak it if it doesnt fit
    -create clean outlines for the torso and other pieces. Not with an even thickness like originally intended (like a string), but more like a ribbon.

    Catch you next time! ( •̀ ω •́ )✧ We're getting there!!
  • Taèe
    Wow looks really good I start second semester next week and our school uses zbrush and maya auto desktop do u use those as well?
  • Taèe
    Btw this is the Same taè I forgot my account so I had to make a new one 
  • BlueChaos
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    BlueChaos polycounter lvl 2
    Yep, Zbrush and Autodesk Maya so far!! If you have the energy to spare I'd invite you to learn Blender on the side as well, personally I'm regretting not having done it after finishing my studies :]
  • Taèe
    Okay thanks so much I will learn that 
  • BlueChaos
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    BlueChaos polycounter lvl 2
    Heya, Long time no see!

    Did a whole bunch of work on this during the past few days, so here is an update (that's a little further along than I'd have liked).

    All the sculpting, retopo and uvs are done, as well as the textures!

    Here's how she looks so far, in all of her current creepy glory.


    As well as a simply updating this post, I wanted to ask you guys what you thought of the texturing. I want it to be the best it can be, so feel free to comment with anything even if it's much above my current skill level! I'm looking for any kind of criticism here really.
    (Some useful context: my main aim was to create a realistic porcelain texture, and to make the rest of the materials believable using PBR as well.
    I'm usually used to working with stylized textures and wanted to hone my realistic texturing skills.)

    After this, I'm planning on rigging and animating her in order to practice, and also to make a beautiful Artstation post.

    Catch you then! :] And thanks again to all of you for the wonderful feedback from before! I hope I was able to somewhat honor it.

    Cheers!
  • zetheros
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    zetheros sublime tool
    cool and creative concept. The colours are good and complementary. Some of the mechanical detail on her face doesn't seem to serve any functional purpose, especially the larger gear. This is fine imo, but personally I find that aesthetics = form + function. Some areas seem a bit sparse on polygons, shoulders, and the metallic caps on her arms and legs. Don't be afraid to use more polys to make sure silhouettes are nice and smooth. Hair could use work, but hair is really hard to do in the first place and you'll get better at it over time

    Hope that helps, good luck
  • pxgeek
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    pxgeek greentooth
    Kudos for progressing so far on this! The porcelain/glaze material looks great!
    Are you familiar with the japanese art (and i guess philosophy) of Kintsugi (mending broken pottery with gold)?
    It's just an idea, not a criticism. But it feels like it could be fitting from a narrative perspective.

    As for crit, it looks like the geometry on her main forms are a little low poly. The breaking curvature of the neck through the shoulders for example. And around the gold trim along her hips. The distortion, I feel detracts from the nicer texture work you have going on.
    Speaking of textures, since your goal is to have realistic looking materials, it remains a bit unclear what the matte blue material is supposed to be. I also wonder if it would be better to have the hands the same material as her body to better unify the look, especially since they are literally disconnected from  her body to begin with? Just a thought. Keep up the great work!
  • BlueChaos
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    BlueChaos polycounter lvl 2
    Hey Zetheros, thank you for the kind words! There's indeed some purely aesthetic parts to her face mechanisms but I'm intending for the pupil piece to be able to rotate (maybe the other thin pieces as well). Hopefully that will balance the big gear not making total sense! In hindsight, I could have planned this better for sure. I wonder if there's anything to do about it at this point...

    As for polycount I fully agree, I might have a try at adding more resolution, even though I have no clue how well it will go so far down the line. This gave me the push to try though!

    Regarding the hair, I absolutely need more practice. Might be a good idea to do some studies, in order to see what looks best before my next project :)

    Pxgeek, I had given some thought to giving her kintsugi detailing! I ultimately decided not to go with it as the textures already feel a little bit too detail oriented. I'm unsure if it's just me, but I feel like I have a lot of big and small, but not a lot of medium. Thank you for the idea though, it could have worked!

    I absolutely agree about the unspecified blue material, I was not able to figure out a logical solution to what it could be. I settled for something that looked like it was painted on, but I wonder if that's the right idea.

    If you have any idea on this material could become, I'd be all ears!

    For now I'll try and play with the poly resolution, see if I can do anything about it. I'll also give some more thought to what to do with the blue material, but I already feel pretty stumped.

    Catch you with the next update! :]
  • BlueChaos
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    BlueChaos polycounter lvl 2

    Hey all!

    Fast update. Decided I'd give upping the body resolution a try today, just to see if it would work out.

    After fiddling around a bit, I subdivided the model in Maya once (using creases where necessary) and got a pretty satisfactory result!
    It needed some elbow grease afterwards, mostly fixing some reluctant topo around poles (there's one on the arm cuts and leg cuts, and inside the eye socket),
    And moving UV points around to smooth out some lines that didn't transfer well.

    After all of this, the body went from 6k tris to 24k tris, and the overall tris count jumped to 60k. It feels acceptable to me for now, especially considering the quality it brings.

    Here's a little before and after of the chin/neck/shoulder area:



    To finish the body up, i quickly tweaked the UVs, using the rendered normal map as a guide. I didn't expect this method to work as well as it did, so I'm really satisfied with it.

    After this I had a look at the next black sheep of this project, the hair. I've been having these horrible zigzag lines even when I was texturing in substance painter but they didn't look as bad as it does in blender.



    It definitely comes from the way I made the UVs for the hair, it's an old habit I got from way back in school.
    (Basically I keep my hair UV perfectly straight so I ca apply a "straight line" texture on it. The wavy shapes are baked brush strokes from when I sculpted in Zbrush)
    It seems to fail when it comes to hair that has any semblance of shape.

    I'm pretty stumped as to what to do about it so far along in the process, especially if I want to keep the texture realistic enough.

    I tried adding some more resolution to the hair which seemed to fix some of the jaggedness at first in Maya, but the results did not carry over to Blender and it looks like there's absolutely no changes. 

    In summary, I think I'll keep the 24k version of the body, except if some of you all think that this is too high. I want to thank you for your feedback again, I feel like this was a huge change.

    As for the hair, I'm still really unsure as to what to do.

    Do any of you have a technique to offer that could help fix the hair a little? It's really a huge deal breaker right now and I'd really like for things to look better :)

    Thank you so much for reading! ヾ( ̄▽ ̄)

    Edit: fixed images
  • zetheros
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    zetheros sublime tool
    for the hair, you'll want to convert the quads to tris before baking iirc
  • BlueChaos
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    BlueChaos polycounter lvl 2
    Ah, I've done so! I always bake on a triangulated mesh as I've heard it's better for the roughness map etc. :) I'll check if it's a triangulation transfer issue of some kind. Thank you for the lead!
  • Pav3d
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    Pav3d insane polycounter
    The zigzags come from the tri's skewing the UV's, since the poly is curved its going from a flat 4 sided face to 2 bent triangles.


    I would just keep adding splits along the vertical until its not as noticeable. A few more loops are not going to break the bank in terms of poly count for a modern game engine.
    Good luck!
  • BlueChaos
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    BlueChaos polycounter lvl 2
    Gave this a try and while it's fixing the fine strand texture, it's messing up the sculpted details in return :/ I think the way I did things is just fundamentally flawed. Might go back to the texturing software and try figure something out*. it's just going to take some time.



    See ya then :]

  • BlueChaos
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    BlueChaos polycounter lvl 2
    Here's the full uncut tale from today.........


    I made some fine line textures to showcase where i need to up the poly res in maya.
    Used it as a guide, fixed things up in maya by moving UV shell points, and added res. It didn't look perfect, but it was a little better.




    (Lesson learned, next time I make hair UVs, I'll use this guide during the process... At least this wasn't all for nothing.)

    Moving UV points would clearly cause issues with the old textures, which means that it's back to substance, and I wasn't sure how to go about it.
    I tentatively made a separate substance file for the hair, then baked it.
    I then exported the new baked normal to CSP and tried cleaning it up, removing additional sculpted on lines,...
    ...
    ...
    ...
    I'll cut you the extra useless tests I did.


    Nothing worked right. I think I could have banged my head on this for a while, at some point, I even considered starting the hair from scratch, but it wasn't advisable.

    Out of frustration, I tried triangulating the hair mesh, importing it in Blender, and applying the problematic textures


    Well.

    It seems like it was just a matter of Blender and Maya triangulating things differently.
    (Blender comparison of using the quad mesh, compared to the mesh I pre-triangulated in Maya)



    On the triangulated mesh, the sculpted lines now look alright, and while the thin line still look a little zig-zaggy, it's way less noticeable.
    I think I'll have to settle for now, seeing how unreasonable the other path was.

    Perhaps I should also pre-triangulate everything else, following this logic.


    Alright, after this enlightening day, I'll do some texture correcting, then I'll have a try at trying to rig things in Blender for the first time, as I'd like to make a pretty animated loop in Blender after this.

    Do you think that rigging and animating a triangulated mesh would even be viable?
    It's going to be a brand new journey, and I'd like to do it right.
    For some reason, I feel like rigging and animating should be done on a quad mesh, but maybe I'm wrong!

    If you know, feel free to let me know! It'd help out a ton.


    For today, I'll wish you all good night  ( ̄▽ ̄) . z Z byebye

    Edi: fixed images
  • zetheros
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    zetheros sublime tool
    pretty sure animation is done on a mostly quad mesh, as it'd be easier to paint weight maps, that's how I've always done it anyway. I'm not a professional animator though, so not 100% sure on that.You can also triangulate critical areas by hand, then let automatic triangulation take over less critical areas. Letting auto triangulation do everything might not give the best results
  • Fabi_G
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    Fabi_G high dynamic range
    Hi! If you're using Blender, there's a triangulate modifier which allows to keep editing with quad topology previewing the triangulated result. The modifier has a few triangulation options, maybe one is consistent with Mayas. To zetheros point, I often triangulate extreme parts manually (or retopo using triangles).

    Keep it up :+1:
  • BlueChaos
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    BlueChaos polycounter lvl 2
    Hey! Two week later, back with quite a few changes 😊

    I decided to take the plunge and re-make the hair from scratch, as I really started disliking it the more time went on.

    I decided to get roughly inspired by a technique found here (used in Final Fantasy if I recall correctly), and tried making it work with my skill level.
    Here's how it looks now!


    I believe that looks quite a bit better than before, even though it could definitely be improved. I'm glad I went for it in any case!

    I didn't just stick to the hair, but I also did some texturing tweaks here and there, more noticeably retouching the made-up blue material.



    I fully embraced the fact it was made up and magical, so I added more colour variation (it was very monotone before), and more notably I added some veins, since it looks like this material is slowly engulfing the character.
    The veins are mostly noticeable when the light hits them just right, thanks to the roughness difference.

    Before leaving, I of course tried Fabi's tip, and it gave a satisfactory result for those interested! The options that looked the best were "beauty", and "keep normals". Thank you so much for being so helpful, I'll definitely incorporate it into my workflow in the future. (๑•̀ㅂ•́)و✧

    With that, I'll finally move onto rigging and animating this little beast.

    Feel free to drop any feedback even if I'm too far along the process to address it, I'm always eager to know how to improve for the next project!

    Catch you later _(* ̄▽ ̄*)ブ

    Edit: Whoops. I finally figured out why images in this thread have been disappearing! I had temporarily been using discord to host my screenshots, and it turns out that when you copy paste images from there it embeds a link. Meaning that when the images get deleted from discord, they stop displaying after a bit. Gonna try fetch the images again to restore the thread!


  • BlueChaos
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    BlueChaos polycounter lvl 2

    Hey all, she's done!!




    You can find more on my Artstation page, including an idle animation, a map breakdown, and more!
    [https://www.artstation.com/artwork/0laD4E]


    I really invite you to check out the porcelain material on Sketchfab, It's hard to capture the way it reflects light in a simple image render.
    Special thanks to all of you that helped during this journey, I hope it was worth it (´▽`ʃ♡ƪ)


    model


    Catch you next time I hope! <3

    Blue
  • HarlequinWerewolf
    Card hair mentioned, I am summoned.

    Glad to see this finished! The textures look really nice! Hair cards have been around for a long time and there's a bunch of resources out there if you ever want to dig into it. You've got the basics with your setup and I'd love to see if you ever try doing cards again :D 
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