WWW#23

I hate the start of the month :( it stresses me out because I see the number of patrons decreasing and I always wonder what I'm doing wrong. I try my best! I'll keep trying my best! This coming week I will go on vacation though, and I won't bring my computer. So I might skip next week's WWW, since I'll be gone most the time. 

This week has been pretty productive! I got the voice lines for the talking part of the Helen animation and rendered a bunch of stuff for it. Also, I sent the script for the Hannah animation to the VA. Hopefully, that gets finished within the coming week. What I've come up with so f

The Knights got a couple more models to play with this week. The Hannah Classic model is out, as well as my first animation file release. For those of you who are not Knights, that means they get to look at the file I used to render the animation, how it's set up, how I animated it, etc. They can also render from new angles if they want. 

This is a thing I'm making for the next Paladin Tier piece. It's a Blender Knight Plushie!

I've also started on the blonker girls remakes, these are leaning more towards the art style of the originals, but I want to keep the outfits of their second iteration. I'm going to remake the classic outfits for when they're filming Kanker sisters parodies OFC. 

What you're seeing here is a version of Noodls' IRL body modified to Helen's classic body proportions. Her arms are a little longer than the classic version because they were too short originally. Lead to a lot of issues with animating her naturally. You'll also notice she has Noodls' skin texture, which I of course will change. To keep it cartoony looking, I think I'll also redo her feet (I'm redoing her hands as you can see). The current ones are a little too realist

c. 

Here I made a couple of adjustments to the face. I'm trying to make it more appealing, while still keeping most the facial features I liked from the old design. 

Here you can see the changes I've made to the side profile. Her old face used to be pretty much ball-shaped, which looked strange from the side. This profile looks much more competent and appealing IMO. 

Here you can see a comparison between the old and new facial topology. I am actually pleasantly surprised at how OK the old one looks, considering I had no idea about topology at the time. The most important parts are there actually, though there are triangles where they have no business being: 

Some times you can use triangles in order to convey a specific shape. In the inner corner of the eye fold, there is a triangle that I don't mind because it can pass as just the shape of the fold. In the middle of the cheek, on her forehead, and on the outer side of her eye, there are triangles that only cause problems because they will cast shadows that look weird and out of place. 

You'll also notice that I separated her body into several meshes in the old version. Simply because I was lazy. I copied and pasted the ears off one of the other girls and just put them there. I also didn't connect her head to her body because I was modeling her body while I was making shape keys for her face. That's fixed in the new version: 

Another thing I've gotten much better at is the hair: 

(Some texture artifacts here, I'll be largely redoing her textures)

Mostly it's just a style change but the techniques I've learned make it a lot easier to do detailed hair now. If you guys are worried about her having the same hairstyle as the second iteration, my plan is for her to eventually cut her hair, so she can wear wigs for different parodies. Like some times she'll play characters requiring totally different hair.  

And Noodls' shoes are rigged! As well as her eyes. Kinda badly but they're rigged! I've been struggling a lot with getting 2D anime-ish eyes to work. IDK how to do it perfectly TBH. But she's usable at this point! I can use her as a basis for other cartoon characters now, which is really exciting to me. We can start getting some stories told!! I can make Abysma!!

I'm attaching the new version of the Helen animation, I've re-rendered a bunch of stuff but I'm already seeing more things I have to re-render. Still haven't gotten to re-rendering the foot shot. It might be too long now, but I think some people will appreciate the foot shot. Maybe I'll do the final shot from that angle? Thinking of having her squirm and having Luego take out his fingers with a trail of goo on them. 

[Edit: something weird as hell happened after posting this one, I didn't notice until now. All the images were attached like twice and in between letters, their order changed, etc. Should be fixed now]