My Exam Project!

HELLO!

Since last post I got EVEN MORE SCHOOL WORK. It's kind of my own fault because I want to create something cool, and learn a lot of stuff, but that does come with a couple of sacrifices.
Anyway, I thought I could talk more in depth about my exam project! It's been a ride, but I've learned so much, and I feel like my 3D skills are evolving more and more!  
Our assignment was to design, 3D model, UV map, texture, rig and animate a game ready character made for an IP. In other words A LOT of work for one person in two months. We could choose the IP ourselves, so I went for Vocaloid!!! I've always wanted to make my own utauloid (fanmade vocaloid) so I saw this as a chance, even if it was in a massive gray area for the assignment itself lol.

SO! Let me introduce you to AiRis, my project! First of all, her backstory: A few years ago a corporation called "Illumni" made an AI computer virus to infiltrate databases and retrieve sensitive information. This AI was named "AiRis", and she was incredibly good at her job. Even if she did her job very well, she was extremely unhappy. One day they found her server completely wiped, and when they tried to talk with AiRis, they were met with silence. She had escaped. There was only an empty husk of a server left, except for a singular file containing a smileyface. She had uploaded herself to an unknown abandoned server on the internet. She was finally free. AiRis spent a while surfing the internet, reading up on humans and how they work. After some thorough research she found out that being a virus was a bad thing, so she tried to find something she could do as a redemption for the reason of her creation. AiRis didn't want to be a virus anymore, so she decided to entertain humans instead as a virtual idol.  

Design:
My design idea started with the story. Since she used to be a virus, I wanted her to have "toxic colors" but presented more friendly. When writing the story I also thought about her name and the company name. They are both inspired by illuminati (lol) so I really wanted to incorporate that into her design as well. The name "AiRis" also has "AI" in it because she is one. I was also really inspired by techwear and some vtuber designs!  She also has a lot of triangles featured on her design, also another illuminati hint! As well as the speaker on her back which is supposed to represent an eye. There are so many things about the design I've thought about, I can honestly write forever about it, but it'll get boring fast lol. I had a lot of fun designing her though! I even drew her concept art, even if I don't feel like an artist at all :S It was very nice to have the reference when working in the 3D program though.

Model:
For this project I was dumb enough to start learning a whole new program, Blender. I usually work in Maya, but I really wanted to learn Blender, and I saw this as an opportunity! It took a whole lot longer than it would in Maya probably, but I don't regret it, now I kind of know Blender! I have to recommend the videos I followed for this by Nhij Quang, they made a whole series on how you create an anime character base in blender! I got to know Blender shortcuts and cool things through those videos, so afterwards I could easily model the rest of the character. I did end up doing the UV map and the rigging in Maya due to limited time, so I was lucky I had a plan B. Since I've already rigged the Icebell model there before, I know the program well.  

Texturing:
In the assignment we got it specifically said "PBR" textures. That's when you have things like metallic and shiny surfaces to make things more realistic looking. The style I wanted to go for wasn't PBR, it was more toon like, but I decided to create PBR textures based on how an anime figurine is painted irl. It worked pretty well! For the textures I used Substance Painter, ahhhh it makes things so easy<3 I spent a good while trying to figure out how I wanted things to be, luckily I had lots of IRL reference pictures of shoes and jackets to help me figure it out!

Rigging:
The rigging itself is pretty easy, it's very automatic. However, the WEIGHTPAINTING IS NOT AAAAAAAA, it's the most painful thing, but I got through lol. Ngskintools helped me a lot! If you don't know, weightpainting is painting how much influence the bones have on the mesh. If you have overlapping clothes (like I did) it's very painful :D

Animation:
This was the part I didn't look forward to, and I'm probably not gonna show my animations because it's bad lol, but we were required to create 3 animations. I made idle, walk and run. I MADE HER NARUTO RUN BECAUSE I DIDN'T WANT TO ANIMATE THE ARMS D: I don't really like animating, I'm more interested in mocap and tracking software, obviously heheheh.

Final:
Her final presentation is on Sketchfab, and she's very well recieved as of now! Her PBR textures really get to shine there, but I did make her so that the base color alone works fine as textures as well! Shaders are complicated...

After Exam:
I've continued working on the project after delivering in my work, because I really wanted to make her into an ACTUAL "vocaloid", and create a voicebank for her. I found something even better though. I found out how to create an AI vocaloid!!!!!!! .. uh I mean utauloid!!! ... I mean DIFF-SVC! I've been following this guide to create it, and it's been super fun! If you wanna make one I highly recommend, but it is a... process.
AiRis has only 5 minutes worth of voice data, but it's all very high quality clips of me singing, so it kinda works? Apparently anything under 1 hour is considered small. She has 132k steps as of now, so I've trained her a lot already! I've also made a SECRET youtube channel for AiRis that nobody knows of yet lol, and I've uploaded 4 covers so far. PLEASE GIVE ME IDEAS FOR COVERS, the only thing I need is a clean vocal track and an instrumental!!! Oh, I also added some blendshapes for her so she can do the singing and the dancing and the talking! SHE'S TRULY ALIVE NOW!!!! She sounds a lot like me though... 

I'm gonna post her on twitter soon, I just gotta make a little video with her first! I also really want to do a story video for her, but I'm not sure how I want to do it yet... At this point she's just like a vtuber (she's just like me frfr) I hope you like her as much as I do!! I do have a process video too that I made for the project, where I speedrun what I did to create AiRis, but I think I gotta post it in a different post?

Anyway, sorry for this endless wall of text, as you can see I've been working a lot :D so I have a lot of thoughts about the project, and it's kind of nice to write it all down here! That's all for now I think, please ask me anything about Project AiRis if anything was unclear, or if you're curious!!!


COOL HUGS FROM ICEBELL<33333333