[Update] New Micro Character – Hugo

Finished up my new general-purpose micro character Hugo.

I sprinted through working on him so I could move on to the next animation featuring him, but in hindsight it would of been better to pace myself a little more. I think for future character models I’ll post an update on here when the sculpt is finished and then another once the rigging, weight-painting, shader and other misc. stuff is done.

Pacing my work and how I want to handle these updates has been on my mind recently, now that my previous animation has given me some more experience of working through projects alongside this page. Overthinking things is a bad habit of mine, but I feel this is something I'll probably make a post about once I've manage to structure my thoughts on it a bit better.

For now let's get back to Hugo.

As mentioned before he’s the first of several general-purpose micro characters I have in mind, and I’ve used him to start figuring out how I want to approach them design-wise. I’m basically looking to move towards a more subdued version of my style for them, to act as a stronger point of contrast with my monster-macros.

Here is how he stacks up against Rog and Lugromm for comparison:

Now, when I say subdued I’m not really talking about body types or builds, more so proportions and volumes. I want it to be that regardless of whether a micro is lean, beefy or big-bellied they feel distinctly ‘mundane’ in comparison to the macros their grouped up with. And I want that mundanity to only further push how much bigger and bulkier these monster macros are.

Meatier hands and feet. Hulking beefy bodies. Protruding muscle guts or massive round bellies. And of course thick hyper cocks and heavy pendulous balls: 

Now... perhaps this isn't the fairest comparison scale-wise, but regardless of how my human characters stack up against each other, I'll always be aiming for my monster-men to be in a league of their own.

Anyway, Hugo is a bit of a special case, because I also want to make an orc version of him for a future transformation + growth animation I have in mind. So I'll get the chance to further fine-tune this contrast with a mundane micro and monstrous macro version of the same character.

That'll have to wait for a bit though.

As eager as I am to make more character models, I don't want them to grind progress on animations and renders to a halt, so I'll be keeping them spaced out between other projects.

Cycles and EEVEE:

Since I’m looking to move away from Cycles and toward EEVEE for animations, I thought it would be worth comparing how he looks rendered in each:

On the whole, not too bad. Recent versions of EEVEE now include limited ray-tracing, which has helped bridge the gap a bit more, though some discrepancies still remain.

How the two engines handle transparency is the main sticking point for me at the moment when it comes to making character models, particularly when it comes to hair.

I'm not really aiming for photo-realism in any of this, and for hair I want big blocky strands whose roots blend into the skin tones below. Kind of like brush strokes. I've reached a result I like in Cycles, but I need to do more work in EEVEE to get it working for longer hair strands.

What’s up next:

I’ll be moving on to blocking in my next micro-focused animation featuring Hugo alongside Lug and Rog. I’m aiming for a short 10-15 second looping animation this time, but we’ll see how the length turns out once I’ve blocked it all in.

More broadly though, my goal for this year is going to be making my next minute or longer animation, so I’m going to be gearing up towards that. 

That vore animation I mentioned before involving Motu and Darius is what I’m planning to go with, so I’ll also be working on blocking that in too. That’ll be just so I can get a sense of it’s final length for now, I won’t be making a start on animating it just yet.