I'm playing around in Blender practicing with some low poly models and textures. Given the season, I dreamt up a spooky Castlevania-esque concept and modeled some characters and monsters. I'm a long way away from being able to put these into anything - just scratching the surface on Godot right now - But I've been having a blast anyway and have made more progress on this go than any other time I picked up blender/unity for a month.
Do you think you could have fun with a light hearted - kinky - PSX style game?
Yeah, I'm not a very practiced artist. Working in this style definitely hides some seams. It's a learning process. I'm glad I enjoy it though. It's frustrating to know there's probably a handful of simple truths out there that would go a long way. I haven't been able to weight paint a rig in a way that produces a good posable mesh. Maybe I should remake the models with the chunk method instead, otherwise I need to research some standard low-poly joint topology.
Oh and here's a Boss monster that escaped the group shot. I'm really happy with him.
The Grandstream Saga was one of the earliest games I ever played, similar graphics (technically lower poly). I know there is that one video about making as Playstation 1 like graphics, characters made out of parts, and I was considering doing that to get around some issues. Think moded (lewded) Lara croft type stuff. The main issue I see with 3D modeling tends to be with the shoulder, arm-twist (shoulder to elbow), and the hips (crotch region). Now I consider myself more of a technical artist rather than an artsy-fartsy artist, since I have more fun making art than sharing art. So I would gladly make a custom mesh, rig, and weight paint, but then I don't do anything with the model, I have more fun with the technical challenge.
Despite my efforts, there is always something better, and I found the Genesis 8 Female model (Daz3D) had the best shoulder topology I have ever seen, but even that still has the same issue. Meshing with it, they use Dual Quaternion (Preserve Volume Mode) and a series of corrective shape keys to fix all the above issues. I've thought of moving the whole model to blender, I've just been lazy (but I have a working proof of concept). So it's good to hear you enjoy the process, there's a lot to toy around with
Okay!
I spent the past few days getting a little more comfortable with Rigging, IK and Weight Painting. I had a hell of a time trying to get Rigify working. I get error messages most times I try to generate the rig, and even when that doesn't happen it seems to ignore the spine every time and deform them model with no IK or and stretches the model every which way. Oh well, I'll figure it out.
So these armatures and controllers were all built from scratch. I'm really happy with the bat. It's really low-poly so getting the weight painting right was really tough. Sorry no sexy animations yet! I've got to cut my teeth on the boring stuff, otherwise I'll just be wasting time when I try to make the animations that really matter .
This week I made my first mid-poly basemesh, complete with orifices', eyes, teeth, tongue, fingers, toes and full resolution texture maps (no more low-res crutch!) I'm really happy with the results, I sketched out 3 characters and made them with the basemesh I created. all done in blender, they're each about 8K tris. Keeping this up is a resolution I hope to keep.
Check em out! I have placeholder names for them of course, but no real character/backstory in mind yet. What do you think these characters are like based off their appearance alone?
Not gonna lie, it's less fun modeling the men. But here's how I plan to fill towns, with 3 base models (young, adult, old) and then a handful retexture skins and clothing shuffling. These guys are about 5K tris each. Happy with the loin cloth design - will work well to animate sex scenes in the future I think.
Next up, low poly NPC Women! Then I'll make some Male Main character NPCs (similar class to the original 3 women I made)
I am beginning to formulate a game idea with these characters. It's pretty exciting. Stay tuned!
Each model gets 2 textures, a skin texture map, and a clothes map.
I seam and arrange the UV Layout manually. unwrapping and placing as I go. You can kind of see, the lighter UV groups are that way because they're double stacked and will share the same texture.
This ensures that the shadows at the UV seams will line up in the textured model.
I use photoshop to paint the texture then. I do the base skin color first with the AO burn on top as a "Color Burn" layer. And then it's a mix of hand painting, and adding photos or other images into the texture.
So here you can see, the tan lines and stuff are hand painted, the nipple and pupil are altered images
Just general photoshop trickery here and there, color overlays, drop shadows, stylize filters and stuff. The last thing I slap on there is an Add Noise filter. It's subtle, but makes the skin look a lot better IMO.
Then you can see the clothing is a lot sloppier, basically just ripped textures organized in quadrants. For these models, I'm using the Oil Painting filter in photoshop on any added real world textures or images. That's a little trick to make everything mesh a little better and fit a consistent style I think.
And then it's just a matter of tweaking the UVs, or tweaking the texture image until I'm happy. For example, in attempting to make the tan lines match up across seams, It's much easier to pull around the vertexes on the UV map than it is to get it right in photoshop.
Is this the best way to do any of this? Probably not. Most of the processes I arrived at are kind of self taught. but hey, at my experience level, I'm pretty happy with what I'm making.
Thank you for asking!
I never would have thought that this was done in ye plain olde photoshop. Also really like that ambient occlusion trick, clever. I tried texture painting within blender itself, like figurine painting, but I'm hot garbage at it. Maybe this approach is a bit easier to do. Or maybe i just need lots more practice..
I never would have thought that this was done in ye plain olde photoshop. Also really like that ambient occlusion trick, clever. I tried texture painting within blender itself, like figurine painting, but I'm hot garbage at it. Maybe this approach is a bit easier to do. Or maybe i just need lots more practice..
I looked over at the model you’re putting together and it looks great! The hair especially. I couldn’t imagine trying the texture painting within blender method. But you’re doing well with it- Different strokes for different strokes, I suppose!
I looked over at the model you’re putting together and it looks great! The hair especially. I couldn’t imagine trying the texture painting within blender method. But you’re doing well with it- Different strokes for different strokes, I suppose!
oh haha i wish i could texture paint that well. No the dirty little secret when it comes to that model is that there are no textures.. all the heavy lifting is done by procedural shaders (freckles, eyes, hair). The rest is vertex color maps to give a base skin tone and to encode other info like roughness, sub surface, freckle location, etc. This is partly because I really suck at drawing, and partly because i want to see how far I can push it.
Another week, another 3 models! These characters are meant to inhabit the village the first main character I created along with the 3 men, along with texture and clothing swaps to create more villagers if necessary.
I was definitely on island time dreaming these characters up.
I'm particularly proud of #2's hair. It was a lot of fun to design and sculpt.
Modeling the flower in girl #3's hair was really fun too, the whole thing came together, from start to textured in like 10 minutes, it was real quick and exactly what I imagined. which always feels good.
Can you tell what character I based #1 off of?
Looking at all of them together I notice a sort of jaundice trend in my skin tones. I'm definitely going to ammend that, and will try to get closer to the generic villager #1 skin color.
Like I said previously next up is a male main character and then I'll do another set of NPCs. what sort of regional/cultural theme would you like to see next?
Enter, The Minotaur... named Dzo. This was a quick one, and all the textures fit on one 512x512! (Though, I think the nose still looks weird.)
I know I should probably take a break and learn to do some face and genital vertex group libraries (is that right?) while I'm at the meshing stage. For right now I'm still very intimidated by rigging but really comfortable making these meshes and texture mapping them. I'm having a lot of fun, that's the point. I don't have patrons to please. Heck, this thread is just a nice void to shout into for the time being.
Making some good progress i see . Meanwhile, im getting somewhat frustrated with facial animations and breast physics.. xD. I might shelve my current project for the moment in order to explore more weeb/cartoony art styles, good opportunity to get to learn a thing or 2 about NPR shading too.. not sure just yet.
Making some good progress i see . Meanwhile, im getting somewhat frustrated with facial animations and breast physics.. xD. I might shelve my current project for the moment in order to explore more weeb/cartoony art styles, good opportunity to get to learn a thing or 2 about NPR shading too.. not sure just yet.
I’m chugging along. But very much just staying in my comfort zone. I keep putting off building a real rig. What’s your go to for tutorials? I’m trying to use
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for my rig. He recreates the same style of rig that the Smash Brothers team utilizes apparently.
I like Royal Skies too, really beginner friendly stuff, straight to the point, gentle introductions into a wide variety of stuff.
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has some good rigging stuff as well.
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has the occasional gem not behind their paywall.
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has some insightful stuff for proceduralism (probably not that relevant to you ). For the rest i just tend to play around a lot, and google lots of things, when i get into some new thing, e.g. how do people tend to do hair? recently i've been looking at different ways to do non-photorealistic rendering (aka toonshaders) in blender.
As for boob physics. I know he has a video on it using wiggle bones. But that has some limitations i don't really like. I know how i want the bones in the breasts to move, but blender's physics engine has been an absolute bitch w.r.t. the dependency graph or random crashes whenever i get something resembling my needs lol.
at least i'm making progress on the facial animation stuff.. she's starting to hit that cartoony sweet spot where you can start exaggerating things without it looking (too) weird.
As for boob physics. I know he has a video on it using wiggle bones. But that has some limitations i don't really like. I know how i want the bones in the breasts to move, but blender's physics engine has been an absolute bitch w.r.t. the dependency graph or random crashes whenever i get something resembling my needs lol.
at least i'm making progress on the facial animation stuff.. she's starting to hit that cartoony sweet spot where you can start exaggerating things without it looking (too) weird.
Lookin good, ya nailed "crazy". I'm not looking forward to face rigging, that's for sure. I'll probably mainly be sticking to vertex libraries (if that's the right thing to call them) My models are low poly enough that that might be my only option.
Do you have a project blog outside of these threads?
