I’ve been having quite a problem making things for a while.
I like to sculpt, and work on new NPR techniques, and I want to show the ships and characters I like well, but in the end, I haven’t ended up posting anything in a long time. I ended up stuck in a crappy perfectionist mindset, always revising or redoing things, or procrastinating from them because I was afraid of getting it wrong, or that it wouldn’t be good enough. But because of that, I didn’t do anything. I don’t have anything finished to show for my sculpting and shaders. But I was encouraged by my friend recently to try and dial it back, and do simpler things and work my way up, and to try and work on my perfectionism, so I’m trying.
I’ve started with chibis. They’re a lot simpler to model and rig than realistically styled characters. I’ve also been finding they’re easier to shade, to an extent; it might be because they don’t have as many bulges and creases and things that can go wrong and look incorrect. Still, I wasn’t able to make them look the way I wanted them to yet. My shaders need more work.
But, I made something. It feels good to have done that, at least.
Millie and I were talking about our Mirror! AU, in which traits of Yugioh characters are reversed, resulting in very different relationships. Jounouchi and Kaiba (we call him Seto in that au, since he prefers to be friendly and warm) are friends, and we had a headcanon that Jounouchi and Seto game together. Millie also made a cute comic about it. It inspired me to imagine them playing an MMO or something together as Dragon Knights, similar to the Dragoons from Final Fantasy.
Since their signature cards in Yugioh are the Blue Eyes White Dragon (BEWD) and Red Eyes Black Dragon (REBD) I designed them to be reminiscent of those, and similar to the Monster World figures from the manga and Toei anime’s Monster World arc.
Then I modeled and rendered them. I’m not very happy with the render, but it’s something; I’ll have to play with their shaders some more, and learn to make environments. Even a very simple one, like the grass they’re standing in was unfamiliar to me. I’ve spent so long doing characters and being a perfectionist about them, I’ve neglected other areas.
Dragon Knight Seto 
Dragon Knight Jounouchi 
An extra render of the pair 
The main render. I brushed out the edges afterwards to remove them, since it was ugly as a square. I’ll have to learn how to do it in Blender.
I’m not very satisfied overall with it, but I’m glad I finally did something. I’m grateful to Millie for pushing me to do something like this. I’ll also make a post for myself about what’s currently going right and wrong with the shaders, and what I want to do to improve them. I’ll try and build momentum and make more things, too.
Riya's NPR Log 