I’ve had a bit of time off work recently. Unfortunately, I’ve been having to move my sleeping pattern around quite severely, so I haven’t been able to use it all as much as I’d have liked to; it’s hard to concentrate when tired.

Still, I’ve been progressing, I think. I’ve almost finished my model of TKB.

I spent a while testing out different methods to see if I could capture shading information separately to the silhouette’s vectors. Object based normals seemed to work, but don’t hold up from every angle. I don’t know how to fix that yet, urgh.

Modeling clothes and such was difficult…I’m not skilled with them. A lot of the time, they’d be sculpted with the creases and such on them already, but this is one I’d want to post in various ways, and they wouldn’t look natural when the creases would be identical in every shot. So I’m keeping the basic mesh simple, and then I’ll add those as and when I need.

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I’m using colour masks to separate different colours. Using R, G and B separately, I can three colours for one image. I’m not good at painting on patterns and such, though. I’m very inexperienced with that.

As it stands, I’ve applied most of the shaders to him, but…It doesn’t look good to me, or like watercolour. Obviously, the shading needs correction, as I haven’t edited his normals yet, but it’s more than that. The silhouette is crap; they always need normal editing to become decent, and even then, it’s not as reliable as I’d like. What I really need is a two dimensional outline…Something that can just consider how it is as a flat shape, not something in 3d space. I could displace it using the camera, but I’d have to change that modifier every time I changed the camera. I need…Some way to filter out those details, to simplify the normals data it’s using. Normal editing works, but I can’t have a real set of normals for a silhouette and another real set for the shading. And it’ll look very 3d if the edge is so perfect without it.

I also did a bit of sketching. I’ve been testing out the Flatten brush. I usually use the Trim Dynamic brush, but the Flatten one seems more effective. I like to sculpt in a fairly planar way, so it’s good at that. I tried sculpting Heat, and retooled his sketch-head into Serph for fun.

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I also practiced mouths. I think I have a better grasp now on how I’d like to model a mouth interior. I’ll try applying it to my next character models.