Phonodroid 3.0 WIP: Work while i was away

Hello! I was stuck without internet for a week, but that did mean I had a lot of time to just sit down and work on stuff I'd been meaning to for a while! I got a whole lot of work done, so lets talk about it!

The main focus on my work over that period was on optimization of mesh detail. The original mesh of the Phonodroid is getting quite old at this point and was first made when i was fairly new to character modeling in blender (looking back at the very first Phonodroid avatar release is a bit hard now lmao). It's gotten a few tweaks since but for the most part hasn't been touched all that much.

So I finally sat down and went Ok. I want this mesh to be under [x] amount of triangles, how do I do that and make it as unnoticeable as possible?

The end result is that the outside shell of the droid is down from 8k tris to 5k, AND thats with added beveling to edges to smooth them out and look a bit nicer.

As a whole, the new Phonodroid is currently 47k tris vs 2.1's mesh being 52k, though that is subject to change as the internal modeling is still very WIP and subject to change. No matter what I will not make the new Phonodroid mesh a higher polycount than the old one though.

So what else is different? Well, there's redesigned hands.

The hands of the previous model iterations were always a sticking point with me even after many tweaks. I finally just went screw it and chopped off the bottom section and redid the palm area. Also, new nails!

More areas of the model have gotten material tweaks. The battery door now has some fancy bump mapping and shine.

And the inside of the battery door is currently in progress of getting a complete overhaul! And it glows.

And heres the (admittedly pretty early) WIP so far of the internal modeling. The redesigned internals are based around a hydraulic system.

The metal material also has a subtle matcap multiplied onto it to give it a more grounded look even if the vrchat world its in has absolutely no cubemap reflections at all

Thats all for now! Heres a general roadmap of whats left to do to finish 3.0:

- Finish internal modeling and texturing (obviously)

- Potentially redesign the leg speakers again. I've been thinking about returning to a redesigned successor to the round speakers of the original perhaps.

- Weight paint Everything. oh boy.

- Fix some UV errors created while optimizing the mesh

- Get the model actually working in VRChat

- Rewrite about 90% of the documentation because so much of it is outdated now with all the changes.

After the base release I'll look at touching up all the original alternate parts to make them visually and technically compatible with 3.0.