Changing is Hard…

This year, I’ve really been wanting to improve. Not just technically, as always, but mostly in terms of my output. Finishing models and not being so perfectionist about them and scrapping them like I have done in the past. I’ve been working hard on that, but it’s very difficult. I realised, at some point my goal just slipped. I started just wanting to make art of the characters I liked, and then it became “Make good(TM) art”. I got into the habit, and lost so much time just studying and redoing.

I’ve been trying to change that this year, but, to my horror, it’s already March. Almost the end of March. I’m honestly not sure where the time went; it seemed like it was just January. I’ve been bogged down with bad mental health and work, and somehow the time slipped right past me. Seeing that, I wanted to push myself. So I decided to make another model. This time, I wanted to try two things. One, making a slimmer base mesh that’s easy to transform into what I need, and two, making a model of Heat.

I’d been struggling a lot in technical ways. Things like, the massive difference between the density requirements for a head and the body. Keeping important details without having to dynamesh the whole thing to a heavy and hard to smooth polycount. How best to make a reusable basemesh without leaving it too rough and undefined; having solid anatomy but also making it soft enough to be versatile. These kinds of things cause me a lot of frustration. I often wish that it was more like real clay might be. Reality doesn’t have a polycount; if you want to smooth something, you can just smooth it. Or tricky angles; you can just rotate your model with one hand, and your tool with the other. The angle you’re using isn’t view-dependent. I found, surprisingly, that it felt like it would be a lot easier if only it was a bit of clay in my hands.

Still, I did try. I made a relatively basic mesh. Just defining the anatomy a bit, but not going overboard.

I’m still crap at legs, and struggle to soften forms in a way consistent with skin. Just using the smooth tool is insufficient; the effect of skin isn’t just smoothing it. It also fills in the gaps, and, with some things like back muscles, for example, can make them seem to take on a different shape, or connect into other muscles that they’re not attached to. It’s very difficult.

But from there, I was able to build it up into a more muscular body. It’s a bit more muscle than the character I was aiming for actually has, but I’ll call it artistic licence.

I’m actually fairly happy with the torso. It has problems, but it’s not terrible, exactly. The legs aren’t good, though.

The head, hands, and feet, were ones I made separately and attached. I had trouble here. The resolution the body needs to get a reasonably level of detail is only about half, or maybe 2/3, of what the head will need. If you dynamesh the head to match the body, you can’t get an adequate level of detail. But if you dynamesh the body to match the head, if you want to tweak things, it becomes more difficult. And it results in a larger file size, making saving and loading more of a hassle. At times like this, I’m very envious of traditional sculptors. To sculpt without ever having to think about a polygon count or something technical like that would be lovely.

It’s also hard when you have to make a mouth cavity, and eye cavities to make them something you can rig. It’s difficult to do those without losing parts of your original face structure, mouth shape, etc, I’ve found. Still, I did that as best I could, and then moved onto clothing and armour.

That’s an area I’m still incredibly weak at; I just don’t have much experience, and the logic of the way clothes are put together, and fold and crease, is completely different from muscles and bones. I’m also not sure, when it comes to technicality, how to put it together. A lot of things would be easier if I only had to consider them as a statue. But models for posing are completely different. I made most of the parts I needed, though they’re not good. The leg parts, I just became frustrated and did a very simplified version. I wasn’t satisfied with it, but it was still something.

Then the last problem was topology. I’d found before that automatic retopology wasn’t quite reliable enough, giving me so-so results in important areas. I thought it would be best to at least do the face manually, but because it was too hard to attach a manual face to a mid poly model, I ended up just manually retopologising the whole thing. It was good practice, but horrible; it takes much too much time, and the ZSphere retopology ZBrush allows didn’t work well on the hands and feet. I ended up having to do them separately and awkwardly attach them.

I later did some tests; it might be better next time if I just do a very low poly auto retopology on the body, make a manual head and attach it, then modify the topology manually as needed and subdivide to the resolution I need. Either that, or I’d have to suck up ZRemesher’s really high poly results.

The trouble with that is performance. In the end, after all that effort, I ended up not even being able to use my model, ugh. The polycount needed to keep most of the details from my model seemed to cause Blender to choke. It kept freezing up on me, and then just crashed outright, without even freezing. It can’t seem to handle it at all. Ever since 2.8, the performance has been bad, and it looks like the recent version is even worse.

If I can’t even do anything with the model, it might as well be a statue, and then I wouldn’t have had to bother with topology or any of that in the first place. It’s incredibly frustrating to have spent my days off on it and then have the software screw me over. If it can’t even handle the character, how will it handle it rigged, in an environment?

So, I’m feeling very frustrated. Wondering why I bothered if it can’t even handle it after all I did. I’m feeling torn. I sometimes just want to give up….But I really want to sculpt and make art. I’m not really sure what I should do. I need to think it over and work out how to make things work, or if I should just give up on it, or change things a lot.

Serph, Perfectionism, 2021

I haven’t posted in quite a while. But actually, I’ve been sculpting a lot recently.

Around the end of this last year, I think I reached a breaking point with my perfectionism. It got to be so frustrating. Back when I started taking sculpting seriously, I was always wanting to get better. To make what I could sculpt match what I could imagine. But, because of that, I got frustrated time and time again. I was constantly scrapping things, and redoing them, and then scrapping that, too. And then I would hate myself for not finishing it, but I’d hate myself for what it was and think it wasn’t worthy of being finished anyway. Thinking back…It was a very toxic cycle. I don’t know if I can say I’ve escaped that. But…I am trying.

I felt like making some Digital Devil Saga fan art a while ago. I made a model of Serph, and some sketches of others. Serph, being the leader and player character, I decided to focus on first and use for practice. I’ve actually learned a lot from this.

For starters, I used one of my base meshes again. I think I improved a bit on the legs, but they’re still not good.

I had a lot of trouble making his armour. Clothes in general, I’m not very experienced with. Let alone armour that doesn’t exist in real life. I ended up researching quite a bit on ways ZBrush artists make them; I ended up finding different, potentially better ways I could have done them after the fact, gah. I ended up having to do some elements in Blender, mainly those round elements. I don’t know what they are, so I couldn’t reference well. The jacket was also a challenge; it’s symmetrical in overall shape, but the zip goes across it diagonally rather than down the middle. Fortunately, ZBrush had just updated with a slice tool for the Zmodeler, so I was able to use that to cut the zip in. I used Zbrush’s default stuff for the zips, but I don’t like to do that, so afterwards I looked it up and learned how to make my own. Next time, I’ll use those instead.

The armour isn’t well done, honestly. The polygon density is all over the place; just compare the jacket to the sleeves, or the boots. It feels tacked together, which it kind of was. I felt clumsy trying to model it. I need to gain experience and skill with that, and make a better go of it next time I make clothes and armour.

I did try some different things this time, though. I found the Zremeshed model was too dense and slow, so I needed to keep detail, but on a lower poly mesh. I found out I could use a tool to draw lines on the model and convert them into polygroups, and use those to help guide the remesh, so I tried that.

It was actually quite effective. I’ll need to play with it more next time and see if I can learn how to make it tick most effectively. I think a careful combination of that and Zremesher guide lines should give a good result. I need it to be relatively low poly; Blender, since 2.8, doesn’t have great performance.

On another note, I tried something different with the shading, too. It seems, in the NPR community, people either use Abnormal or the data transfer modifier right now to get good shading. But, Abnormal is too slow for me to use on anything like this. And the data transfer…It is handy, but I can’t get to like it. It’s so…Uncontrolled. You just have to hope it gives you what you need. And, because it’s going off of geometry positions, you can’t really do anything that’s too far away from it, or super wonky. Limits.

So, this time, I tried painting vertex groups and using the Normal Edit modifier.

Each group was related to a vector. It’s a bit similar to what anime-style NPR artists had done, but they can get away with a bit more, because they’ve been using simpler, generally more moe, styles. But building straight into your topology has problems; if it’s simple in or out of the vertex group, it has a hard edge, so the light will suddenly snap. And if you use any gradients with it, you’ll have an area that gradually lightens as the light is rotated, but where the lit area remains all the same, looking unnatural.

Those also can get away with a bit more. Like using one vector for one side of the face, and one for the other; in a cel-shaded style, a sharp crease in the middle of the face isn’t necessarily so bad, but not good here, so I had to make several. A front, front-side, and side. I could make even more if I wanted to, but I think blending between those is enough.

By using weight paints, I could give it smooth shading at the end. While I was working on it, I used a hard-edge weight paint brush; no need to make it smooth by blurring until I knew it was going to be good. Although, next time I could build the shapes into the topology a bit, too, and just smooth out their edges. Although I’m not too fond of that idea; it seems like it could mess with the deformation in animation.

It took a while, since it’s my first time trying this method, but I was satisfied with the results.

I really liked the face shading here. Although, it’s difficult to get it right from all angles.

I also did some normal editing on his armour; this is an incomplete version, which you can tell from the face being non-smooth. On the armour, I tried for a bit of a simpler version. Just a front, back, left and right group. I think it made it more prone to being dark, though. I tried to follow the shape of the armour. I’ll have to practice this more. But, I liked how it came out, mostly.

I’m also on V10 of my shader. Right now, I’m using Toonkit for Cycles. It’s convenient in some ways. It lets you isolate the shading of a specific light, and it lets me use an outline, which I used to make a softer edge, that won’t mess up like fresnel.

The trouble is, as it’s cycles, it’s a lot slower. It also doesn’t give me any way to account for reflections, unlike Eevee. I think I could replicate it in Malt/BEER using GLSL, given a bit of time, but I tried it and the performance was shockingly bad. It seems my computer’s VRAM is way lower than it should be.

Ultimately, I was very disappointed, though. I had trouble rigging it, and just got frustrated and finished it so I could be finished.

It just looks bad, sigh. I couldn’t control the linework well, and after baking the normals to textures, they had some artifacts. The face doesn’t look good now – maybe in part because of the colours – and it’s stiff as fuck. And because it was Cycles, it was difficult to see these things before rendering. Plus, some of them probably would’ve gone away if I’d used more samples, but it would take hours to render. I need to investigate more and find a solution.

Lightning Boy Studio released their shader for Eevee. It’s quite good.

I don’t intend to buy it, though. I can already do pretty much everything it can. But, what catches my eye is how it can isolate different lights. I’d known for a while it’s possible using drivers, but I don’t like to use them because it means you have to either keep one light with one character no matter what you do, or go to the hassle or resetting it every time. But, being able to do that in real time would be very convenient. The trouble is, Eevee still has no way to give me the outlines I need. I don’t really want to drop that feature, because it’s important for getting an uneven edge and making things look less 3d without compromising the linework with actual displacement. But, it’s worth looking into. I want to isolate lights, but in a way that minimises the work I have to do. One or two clicks would be best. Although, my shader in general seems to choke Eevee, so even if I could do that I’m not sure how much good it would do.

All in all, I’m frustrated, but I still have goals. I want to make another model. And then another one. And another one after that. Each time, I can learn. I can make the next one better. I want to make the next one better. I don’t want to be bogged down hating myself and what I’ve made anymore. I’m not really one for new year’s resolutions, but I do want to make a lot of art this year.

I’ll make another model of Serph when I’m a bit better. A better one. But not now. Not scrapping this one to do it.

Progress

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.

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.

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.

Progress

I’m feeling better now than I was last time I posted. Still a bit frustrated, but better. I’ve been doing more sculpting and working on my shaders.

I’m up to version 9 of my watercolour shader now. It’s almost complete, as far as key features. I want to re-add the ambient occlusion into it, but it seems very particular; the threshold needed on the colour ramp to make it show strongly enough is about the different between 0.99 and 1.0.

I’m having problems recently, though….It keeps crashing on me. I spent a day getting frustrated and trying to find out why. It seems it’s to do with the negative space. In real watercolour, to make that you’d most likely isolate a space you want to keep white, like masking it out. I tried to replicate this with my shader by using a factor that mixes the applied colour (silhoutte, shading, etc) with the canvas colour, and removes edge soak and such, so you get your colours with that area preserved.

The trouble is, if you isolated that area, I think you’d get edge soak at the edges of it. At first, I thought i could just pipe in the negative space to the colour mask I use to control shading. That would remove the colour there and it would be put through the same ramp as the silhouette, and get edge soak. It does get edge soak, but because that ramp’s result is used for the alpha, it also means it gets transparent there, which isn’t the desired result. The next logical step, then, would be to just use the edge soak node directly on the negative space and add that to the edge soak of the silhouette, shading etc, itself. But it crashes. Even just using the edge noise, it crashes. If it’s manipulated directly, it crashes. I don’t understand it. I tried debugging it. I tried using the same node combination outside of the node group, and it worked. But inside it, where it needs to be? Crash.

It’s very frustrating. So for the moment, that’s missing from the shader. I think it’s a bug in Blender itself; it seems to be present in 2.82 and 2.90, at the least. I’ll have to try a workaround, like combining it into a colour and seeing if that works when it’s not being manipulated directly.

Because of that, it’s not quite right, but I’ll have to make do right now.

I’ve also been wanting to sketch more. Last night, I had a whim and had a go at sketching Helda from Ascender. Her face is a bit difficult…Very strong and angled, but feminine. I found it fun to sketch, though; I need to sketch more. Recently, I’ve been thinking that I’d like to do more sketches and sculpts that are just there to be sculpts and rendered as such. Not necessarily things that I’ll process to render NPR-style.

Eyes are nice to sculpt. I find them difficult when I’m doing them for an eyeball mesh. But I found after sketching these, it was easy to put one in for a test. I might sketch them first like this from now on before doing the actual mesh eyes. I got some help from Millie with the face proportions, though. She pointed out, I tend to make the noses too short, which is fair. I’m not good at noses; I end up making them too short because I’m worried I’ll make them too long and they’ll look bad. I need to fix that.

Lastly, I’ve been thinking of how I might normal edit my meshes to look better. I was thinking I could isolate the planes of the face using face sets, vertex groups, polygroups, etc.

I tried grabbing them, roughly, on a demo head, and using GoB. I can have it convert them to vertex groups or face sets, but face sets can’t be used with modifiers, so vertex groups are better. This way isn’t very precise, though; I think instead, I’ll just paint the vertex groups in Blender, where possible. I can soften their edges a bit, too, which should help it be a bit smoother, I think.

The Abnormal addon is what most NPR people seem to use these days, but it performs too slowly for me. Maybe because of the meshes I’m using being fairly high poly, but whatever the case, it’s not quick enough. I was thinking of using the normal edit modifier; I can select the vertex groups I need, set up an empty, and have them point at it. It’s non-destructive until applied, and I can rearrange them, add or remove from the group, so that’s helpful. A little bit slow, though. This method also relies on quality topology a bit more, and sometimes, shapes being built into it, so I’ll need to account for that. For my current model, TKB, though, I’ll just use vertex colours to fix his shading.

Hopefully I can post again soon; I’d like to show more sketches and things.

Thief King’s Progress

Recently, I’ve been working on a model of Thief King Bakura. I feel like I’m finally making some progress. I sculpted him using dynamic topology, and then dynameshed him to smooth out. I used a male base mesh I made, which I’ve saved for use on other models for time saving.

I’ve run into problems with clothes, though. I couldn’t get sufficient quality from ZBrushCore. They’d melt together, and elaborate clothing seemed borderline impossible. So, I decided to try ZBrush full. I’m currently using the trial version, and its features are very convenient. In particular, Zremesher. I had to faff around with it for a while to learn how to make it tick, but I seem to have a decent grip now. Apparently, the trick is to give it less strokes, not more, which tripped me up.

It seems the less, the better. The topology isn’t quite perfect, but very good, and a huge time saver. Up until now, I’ve been using 3DCoat to retopologise the body, then having to manually do the face and awkwardly fuse it on, which takes time and isn’t as clean.

I used this for Bakura’s model. But I’ve realised some mistakes I made while doing so. After retopologising him, I discovered ZBrush seems to only allow you to bake normals from a higher subdivision level to a lower level one. You can’t, apparently, bake from one subtool to the other. I had the high detail, dynameshed TKB model, and wanted to bake them to the low detail retopo TKB model which was a different subtool, and I couldn’t. So on this occasion, I had to bake his normals in Blender. I also couldn’t seem to get the UV Master to work for me. It may be intuitive for some, but I’d rather work with real topology. Manual control would be better for UV mapping.

Anyway, this is the current state of my TKB model in Blender.

This time, I’m relying a lot more on on-model detail. My Maya model relied more on normal maps because I wanted to avoid having too many polygons, but it ended up being too much hassle. And at least this way, I have flexibility; you can always sculpt corrective shape keys for muscle movements on the fly, but a normal map is stone. You can swap it out, but it’s not truly dynamic. So I’m only going to use it for minimal things. I know the Guilty Gear Xrd method, which is popular, does it all with real geometry, but I don’t think that’s practical for everything. Not all details would have a solid start and end point. Scars can often fade out, for example.

Currently, I’m working on his shaders. I need to sort out the paper texture, fix the shading edge soak, and add masks to define differently coloured areas, like his scars. I also intend to modify the normals this time, so I don’t have to correct as much using vertex paints. Since the performance doesn’t seem fast, those kinds of changes are sluggish and difficult. I’m not really satisfied with my shader, but right now making stuff is more important. I feel like I’m making progress fighting my perfectionism. I see a lot of flaws with his model, but I haven’t let myself stop and go backwards.

I don’t want to go backwards. I want to go forwards.

I didn’t remember to record to show my process while working on this, but I do have previous versions as subtools, so I decided to make a gif to show the profession. It’s something that encourages me, too. Looking back at the progression of it from a blob to something looking reasonably like a person. I like to watch timelapses like that sometimes. I’m really interested seeing different artists’ techniques.

While working on Bakura, I was listening to some music from a drama I’ve been watching with Yan, Crash Landing On You. It’s actually very good, and has a nice soundtrack.

These tracks really remind me of citronshipping, somehow. Especially Picnic…It makes me think of nice scenes with Bakura and Malik relaxing at home, bantering, doing things together, having fun….Making Bakura start to realise that life has things worth living for in it, too. That’s something I want to show. After I finish Bakura, I’m going to make Malik to go with him, haha.

Speaking of things I like to see, I’ve been watching videos from a channel recently called DokiDoki Drawing. It’s a Japanese channel focusing on art.

I’ve been really enjoying their Pro VS Amateur videos. It’s nice to see different ways they approach things, and it’s quite informative when the professionals explain things about their choices, like things they do for balance, emphasis, style, etc. I’m not a 2d artist, but it is enjoyable seeing them talk about it. It might be better for me that way; if they were 3d artists, I’d probably feel bad about my skills watching them. They also seem to have a good variety of people on it; foreigners as well as Japanese people, amateurs and professional mangakas, etc. It makes me a bit more motivated seeing people’s progress. And they don’t take themselves too seriously; I remember them joking in one video that a cyberpunk design came out more steampunk. Not getting angry about it or taking things too seriously and losing the fun of it.

Uchida Shinnosuke in those videos has interested me; she’s appeared in a few. From what they’ve mentioned, it seems she particularly enjoys and focuses on cyberpunk. But cyberpunk isn’t very popular in Japan at the moment, it seems. But instead of ditching what she really enjoys, she continues to do it, and aims for the people who do enjoy it. That’s something that’s nice to see. Too often, people act like you should just forget what you like and go for some…Mass market appeal. I hate that kind of thing. I can understand incorporating elements that give something wider appeal. That can be a savvy move, sometimes, I think, but to ditch everything I’m interested in just for that? It would be a pointless endeavour. So it’s nice to see someone like her persisting with the genre she finds interesting regardless of whether or not it’s currently in fashion. I’m also quite fond of cyberpunk, from what I’ve seen, so that helps, haha.

Anyway, I have more to do. I think I will invest in ZBrush full. I can’t afford to buy it outright right now, so I’ll have to cough up to subscribe for a few months and save my pennies. Being able to bypass the pain in the arse stuff like retopology is a godsend. It’s not a creative step…It’s just a pain in the arse technical one. I also spent some time on my body deform cage. I’ve added IKs to the legs and arms and spine. They’re not super complicated ones, but they make it easier to pose. They were difficult to set up; I haven’t done them before now.

I’m sure animators are cringing. Or anyone with any decent experience rigging, haha. But it’s a step up. I’ll need to fix the deform cage, but as long as the bones work.

That’s all I have to show for now. This post became a bit of a ramble….But it’s good to talk like that, I think. I don’t want my blog to be just some formal thing.

Next up, Bakura’s clothes and hair. I’m going to try something a bit different this time.

Sketches And Clothes

I’ve been doing a lot of sketching recently. Until recently, when I’ve been making models, they’ve been focused at making something ready to retopologise and rig, something I could put my shaders on to render. It’s difficult, and time-consuming…Having to thing about whether it’ll hold up from multiple angles, different zooms, if the retopology is sufficient for the posing it’ll need…It’s hard.

Yan suggested I should sketch more, and when I tried, it was quite fun. It’s a lot less stressful, I’ve found, when I sketch. Not having to worry about topology or think too hard on rendering. If I want an eye, I can just carve one in. Not have to make a particular cavity for an eyeball because it’ll need to be able to rotate by itself when it’s retopologised. It only needs as much detail as a sketch needs…Not realistic, refined details. It’s….A lot more fun and relaxing. I’ve found myself getting into it a lot more.

I’ve been sculpting a lot of heads recently. I really want to get better at them. The image on the top left is how they tend to look before I dynamesh them to smooth them out. I like to carve them out more than add volume; it feels more natural to me, and it makes it easy to make the planes. Then when they’re firmly established, it’s easier to keep the shape when smoothing it out. I was quite pleased with the top left one, for a sketch.

I’m also trying to sculpt different kinds of faces….More realistic, more stylised, boney, soft. I don’t want to be only capable of sculpting one type of face. Or end up as one of those annoying CGI character artists that can only seem to sculpt scantily-clad women.

The male character there is a TKB model I’ve been working on. The face below that image is his. It’s difficult….For practice’s sake, I’ve focused on trying to learn realistic anatomy. But the Yugioh manga is very stylised, and they have very sharp faces. I couldn’t see Bakura, or any of them, with a very realistic appearance, like a wide chin or such. Takahashi’s style favoured sharp corners. So I tried to adapt that to a more realistic style, to make a semi-realistic type, keeping the sharp chin and nose, but not departing totally from reality. I’m not sure if I succeeded or not…But it’s a work in progress.

I feel fairly satisfied with his body, at least. It’s definitely not perfect, but it is better than previous ones I’d done. I took a bit of a different approach to sculpting the legs, which seemed to work out. The lower legs look better than previous efforts…Though the upper half isn’t great. I should also tweak the arms a bit…They don’t seem quite right. Too angular.

I also decided to practice making clothes. I’ve hit a wall here, unfortunately. ZBrushCore doesn’t seem to have good tools when it comes to making clothes with any complexity.

I tried making a jacket. This is an important test case because the flaps are a bit complicated. They fold over, but don’t connect, to the main jacket. Core doesn’t have any modeling tools, so I made it by masking and extracting. But when I tried to merge them, the image on the right happened. The dynamesh fuses it onto the jacket, and, I think because it’s narrow rather than thick, creates holes. It’s very frustrating….I realised working on that Maya model, it would be better to be able to just sculpt the clothes. Then I don’t have to mess about with topology until I have to retopologise it, and case relatively easily add things like zips, seams and buttons. But if it can’t handle something as simple as a flap, it’ll most likely choke on anything reasonable. And I really don’t want to have to model it and then waste hard drive space exporting it into ZBrushCore and then time having to align it properly. I tried using 3DCoat’s retopology tools to make a basic clothing mesh and then sculpt it there, but it can’t handle backfaces and lacks convenient tools to model anything that isn’t directly on the mesh, so I couldn’t really get it to work. They’d advertised their new cloth simulator and the support they’d put in the retopo room for making clothes, but it’s not really convenient for anything elaborate….Seems to be a running issue with 3DCoat.

So I’m very frustrated because of that. Character models aren’t good without clothes. I need to get better and able to make those. Especially given that some of them are very character-important, like TKB’s jacket in our version of citron. I have to find a solution.

Maya And Changes

I finished my model of Maya. In the end, I’m very dissatisfied. The character model itself isn’t terrible, but has a lot of flaws. I modeled the clothing the old way, thinking it would save some effort, but it ended up being more of a hassle. I think next time, I’ll sculpt and retopo it instead. I also noticed clipping on the skirt that shouldn’t be there; it’s rigged the same way as the body, so it should have moved as one.

The Freestyle lines behaved unexpectedly in a lot of places, too. The mouth and fingers, for example, are totally covered by the lines. It’s not a good look at all. I wanted to change it, but for some reason, the shader took a ridiculously long time to render; it was all I could do to get one image. Partly, it was because Freestyle, I think; the hair is dense and a bit complicated, so it probably made it choke. I added the hair to a collection that Freestyle should have ignored, but I must have made an error, because it rendered it anyway.

I did manage to work out rigging now, at least. I used a mesh deform for the body, and then armatures for the hands and face. It was really tricky setting up the vertex groups just right for that, and a hassle, but it can’t be helped.

I have that now, though, so I’m going to save it separately for easy reuse on other character meshes. That way I won’t have to re-rig entirely each time. In this instance, I made a larger duplicate of the main one to use on the clothes. Next time, I might just make only one cage for all of them and just make it bigger. I need to change the weights in some places, though. The arms didn’t deform quite right. It might be a corrective shapekey requiring issue.

I’ve also realised I should change tactics with some things. With this model, I used normal maps instead of a higher poly count, because I thought a lower-poly mesh would be easier to work with. It was, but it also limits it. I can’t modify the shading normals the way I could on a standard mesh, because the normal map would be applied after that. And it ended up being a pain trying to keep the details via the normal map; I think next time, I’ll just make a higher poly mesh from the sculpt and preserve the details as much as I can via raw polycount instead of tricks.

I also need to revise my watercolour shader; I need to find out why it was so slow to render, and fix it. It was too sluggish to modify the shading using my vertex colours method, so I had to render as was, which is not ideal.

I have a lot of things to do differently next time. I’ll do better. Next, I’m going to make models of Malik and Mariku using those techniques.

Maya and Progress

I’ve spent quite a bit of time recently trying to get used to ZBrushCore and adapt to the way it works. I’ve become quite annoyed at myself; there are several things I didn’t know about it that would have been very useful if I’d known about them sooner. Like Dynamesh being able to preserve edges, or not, according to a slider. 3DCoat could make even topology using voxels, but was limited to the voxel grid, so it couldn’t preserve them. Having that feature has made it easier in ZBrushCore to do that. So I’ve been spending more time recently working in it and trying to adapt. I should have used it sooner, sigh. Although, from what I remember it was more expensive before, and didn’t have Sculptris Pro, its dynamic topology sculpting, when I looked before, but still.

In any case, I’ve been using it a lot. I’ve become quite accustomed to the controls now…I’m starting to see what proficient ZBrush users mean when they claim that it’s actually fine once you get used to it. When I went back into 3DCoat for some retopology, I had difficult navigating because I’d got used to way to do it in ZBrushCore.

So far, as far as workable model parts go, I’ve made a male and female base mesh. I made the male one for starters, mainly for practice. I want to make lots of character models…I’d rather they be bespoke, but sadly that’s just not practical. So, the next best thing is to make a base mesh to save time, then add unique heads and modify them into distinct models. That saves time, making it more workable, and is efficient.

I made the male one first, then retooled it into a female mesh. I was planning to make the female base mesh from scratch, but I really wanted to just have something. Looking at them now, the abs have kind of melted on the male one. I haven’t got the hang of smoothing just yet, entirely; I end up being a bit too aggressive with it. I want to make some proper models from these….Malik, Mariku, Ryou, Bakura, and lots of others. I didn’t give breasts to the female mesh; since those vary from woman to woman, it didn’t make sense to add them there. I don’t want to be one of those artists that gives all their female character models the same chest, or the same body type in general, at that.

I made hands and feet beforehand to practice and attach to the models. I didn’t get them quite right, though; the palm of the hand is bad, and the toes aren’t quite right. I sculpted them a bit differently to the way I saw in tutorials I got; I wanted them to be separate pieces, just in case that was ever a focus. It’s unlikely, since I don’t do anything focusing on feet, but I want the option.

Unfortunately, having put the effort in one details like the fingernails and toenails, they were erased by having to dynamesh them together onto the model. It seems ZBrushCore doesn’t have proper booleans. I have to resculpt them after. I also didn’t get them quite right, the way the feet are on the models. Legs in general, I’m very weak at.

I started making a model of Maya from Persona 2, to see if I could get a decent character model. I found that even ZBrushCore was slow if I subdivided the whole model high enough to get high details on the face like sharp creases, but I could mask an area and subdivide that, and, unlike 3DCoat, it was still smoothable within that area because they were quads. Although, it meant any smoothing at the edge of the subdivided area was problematic. I could sort of correct it with the decimation smoothing of Sculptris Pro, but not so well. Next time, I’ll have to leave the sharp details for very last and not get ahead of myself.

I think I managed to make a decent face. I still haven’t worked out mouth interiors, though, and the ears were terrible so I drastically simplified them. Right now, I’m relatively happy with the overall state of it, at least. I think I’ve confirmed that sculpting that way can get reasonable results, as far as mesh quality is concerned.

I retopologised it in 3DCoat, but didn’t end up baking there; the 2048×2048 limit is too low, and upgrading to the pro version is too expensive. I baked the normals from the high poly in Blender at 4096*4096, with one UV map for the whole body, for the sake of speed. It seems to give decent results, though for long term stuff, I should make proper UVs; I went with a mangled automatic one for testing.

I also, while I was there, tried a Fake SSGI shader I came across, by 0451 on the Blender Artists forum. It’s clever; it gives more realistic looking results, and responds to lights better than a standard Principled Shader does. I’m planning to experiment on my pseudowatercolour shader and see if I can apply any of this into it. I’m not satisfied with how responsive it is, especially due to the use of colour ramps. I know of a way I might be able to make it respond to colour, too, which I need to experiment with.

Using a very simple version on the normal mapped, low poly model, it seems to soften the shadows a bit, when using a sun lamp and a point lamp, whereas the standard diffuse doesn’t really do anything. I’m sure someone more savvy regarding lighting setups could highlight it better, but what matters is, it’s useful. I’ll experiment with it.

It was inconvenient getting the model this far, though. I’d rather have baked it in 3DCoat, but other than the inconvenient texture size limit, and shoddy implementation of UDIMs I’d have to work around, it triangulated the model on import, which messed it up a bit, so I had to avoid it by baking in Blender, which is quite an inconvenient program to bake in. I need to find a more elegant solution.

Still, I feel I’ve made progress. There are anatomical errors with these models, no doubt, but I feel like I can fix it technically. That I’m not being held down by some stupid problem in the software. That’s refreshing.

As for personally, it’s been a mixed bag recently. I haven’t been feeling very good, and had a relapse of self-harm. I haven’t been sleeping well, either….I couldn’t sleep for most of the night the other day, feeling horrible, and when I have been sleeping, it’s mostly been nightmares. Perhaps it’s my brain’s way of telling me to wake up and make myself useful, haha. I get hunted a lot in my sleep. I often die. The other night, I dreamt me and some others were running away from a monster. We got to an arena, with a sign claiming the only way to stop the monster was for two people to fight in the arena and one to kill the other. I didn’t have the heart to kill my opponent, and woke up muttering a volunteer for death, not for the first time.

My sister has been more aggressive recently, too. We’ve been arguing more. The other night I got told to drink bleach because I yelled at her for yelling about some stupid crap in a video game she was playing. I was quite tempted to swallow some just to spite her.

Things will probably get better. I’m making progress, I think. I need to make more.

On this blog, I’ve mostly written about my NPR work so far. But the other reason I started it was to write about how things are going for me in general, too. It’s good to vent about things, or just process, so that’s what this post is for.

I’ve been quite annoyed at work recently. I work in a shop. Obviously, with the coronavirus pandemic, that’s made it more stressful than usual. During March and April, we probably had double or more our usual amount of customers coming in. That wouldn’t be so bad by itself, but since this lockdown, I’ve noticed more….Inconsiderate people. People who think the rules don’t apply to them, like signs saying not to enter and aisle because we’re working it – especially the bloody alcohol section – quite a few customers have blatantly ignored.

I get very frustrated with people like that; it’s like they think they and their…Petty wants are the only things that matter. They aren’t even buying anything important. I could understand at least, if they were bypassing the no entry barrier to get some toilet roll or basic food, but it’s not. It’s always the ones after their alcohol that think they’re more important. It’s making me quite cynical, unfortunately, as if I wasn’t enough already; I’ve really come to think that most people who live near the shop I work in are just alcoholics, and/or gambling addicts. Hell, according to the rumour mill, even one of the supervisors is an alcoholic.

Despite the pandemic, the lockdown, people have continued to come in several times a day to get their fix, buying multiple bottles of booze, or cans, or sets of scratchcards, cigarettes….Those people really make me dislike my job. I don’t want to help people continue their addictions. And I just really dislike having to serve people that think they’re more important than everyone else. Because of that, I’ve been developing more of an attitude recently; when a customer got angry at me for telling him to stand behind the line that marks a 2 metre distance, I just said “Whatever”. Not exactly great customer service, but I’ve really exhausted my patience for that kind of person.

We’ve also had a significant increase in threats towards staff members, and general shitty attitudes. I haven’t experienced much of that, though, at least directly to my face. I think it’s because they don’t see as a woman though, sigh; it’s the female members of staff who’ve been getting the most of it. Probably because they’re most likely cowardly men who feel more confident picking on them.

So work has been quite tiring recently because of all that. I have some time off soon, which I’m looking forward to. I hope I can use it well, as well as relax a bit. My colleagues are mostly good, at least; recently, I’ve been getting on well with one who I talk to about films and other media when we’re on shift together. He writes films and wants to work in that industry, so I can relate a lot with discussions about different things we look for in media, thoughts about generically popular stuff, etc.

On another note, I’ve recently been trying ZBrushCore. I got very frustrated with 3DCoat. I’ve been trying really hard, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t get a good enough surface quality. I upgraded my RAM, which helped get better performance, but it couldn’t let me get high enough to use voxel meshes at a high enough resolution to hide the jaggedness, so they’d never stand up to a close up. I realised, when it came down to it, the problem was the mesh type. It uses triangles, which are very hard to get a smooth surface with, and don’t crease well. So I thought I’d try Core; last time I checked it, it didn’t have Sculptris Pro, its version of dynamic topology, so I didn’t get it. I find ZBrush’s dynamesh-focused way of making a mesh very awkward…It feels unnatural to me to have to do the whole model at one fixed resolution, limiting how much you can detail it, having to do it all at once. I find it much more natural and convenient to just do what I want to whatever detail, without having to worry about resolution while I’m sculpting. Obviously, the final mesh needs to be even, but it’s so awkward having to think about topology while sculpting. It’s said to be easier because it forces you to focus on forms, primary, secondary, tertiary details in order, but I just can’t seem to get the hang of it.

Core is a lot cheaper than full ZBrush, which is sitting at like £900, basically. I’m quite enjoying it so far; it’s a lot easier to get a good, smooth mesh, though I’m having difficulty adapting my sculpting style. I’m used to using a flatten tool that levels area to block out a lot of shape, like slapping on a bit of clay and scraping off the excess to make a plane. Core doesn’t have that kind of brush, though it does have a somewhat similar brush, except it doesn’t level it.

I’ve been doing some sketching. Recently, I’ve been trying a more traditional style of sketching; just sculpting everything without thinking of it as something that needs to be ready to use on a retopologised model, like sculpting the eyes onto the mesh rather than giving it hollow eye sockets with separate eye objects.

They’re very bad, but to be fair, they’re sketches and I’ve been trying to get used to a new program. I found the navigation very difficult at first; I wasn’t used to the way ZBrush does it at all. Looking at them all now, though, I really need to vary my faces up. They all have the same cheekbone shape, and the way it makes that sort of 7 shape from the corner of the eye to the chin. And reference more, of course. The ears are only good on these because they’re a ZBrush asset, haha.

I’ve still got to totally get to grips with it, but I am finding it a bit easier now. When I have the money, I think I’ll buy it. I feel like I can make the mesh quality I need with this, since it generates quad meshes instead of forcing triangles on me. Although, I’ll still use 3DCoat for retopology, UVs, texture painting and normal mapping, since it’s good at those and Core has no such functionality.

Anyway, I’m trying to improve and get back on track with my sculpting. I want to get better and make more, and my watercolour shader is just waiting to be used.

I think I should make more posts like this, though. It’s good to just ramble about things sometimes, and talk about WIPs without feeling like I have to talk about some milestone.

Curly Hair With Curves

Today, I’m making a post that’s a bit more general. I don’t really have readers, but maybe someone will stumble across it and find it useful. Or if I forget how I did it.

I’ve been struggling with a character model’s hair for a few days, because it’s curly. They seem to be quite complicated to make seem right, and also be controllable. I was looking at this video for a method of making hair.

I like this method. It’s not as realistic as other methods – not as easily, at least – but it is very controllable. I don’t like particle hair much. It’s a pain, and it leaves too much out of my hands. I’m not interested in simulations, either. I need more room for style and departure from what’s strictly realistic.

Anyway, at the end of the video, it referenced and showed a model with curly hair, but didn’t say how to do it, so I’ve been experimenting trying to work out how to do it.

I came up with this.

With a version of my Psuedowatercolour V6 shader applied.

I’m quite satisfied with how these look, actually, at least as far as testing purposes go. I tried a few different strands with differently curlyness, though I didn’t reference as much as I should. Mainly this has just been to experiment. I made a similar hair shader to the one presented in that video, and adapted it to my shader by using it to make the hair alpha. I could also use the bump, but I didn’t feel like it at the time. I didn’t get it quite right, though, since I was modifying it to test other things, so only the very ends appear uneven, which I need to fix.

Here’s how this method works.

First, you need to to make a curve. In this case, I made one curve object with multiple pieces. They have to be offset from the centre something like this. That’s very important. The distance allows control over how wide the curls in the hair will be, so I didn’t want to go too overboard. I used multiple pieces for a bit more volume, though it does give less control overall.

Next, make a new curve, and use the original one as a Bevel Shape for it. That’ll extrude the original curve along this one. Then, for each point along the curve, use Ctrl_T to twist it. This is where the offset in the original curve comes in. Because it’s offset, it’s twisting it around the second curve. By setting the twist amount on each, or most, of the vertices to something high like 360 or more degrees, it creates a lot of curls.

Then lastly, I use a subdivision surface to smooth it out. This can make the polycount high, so I make sure to reduce the resolution of the original curve and hair curve so they’re not too dense in the first place. Another modifier like the Smooth modifier might do decently as well, but this can make it very smooth since it adds geometry. Plus, you can increase or decrease it easily according to how smooth you need it to look on-screen at any given time from just one menu, whereas curves would need you to alter the resolution on the original curve as well as the second one.

I’m fairly satisfied with the results I’m getting so far, so I think I’m going to try applying it to Nagi’s character model and see how it goes.