Lots more work done this week! Before starting work on finalizing the model, I wanted to try posing and lighting him to see how he was coming along. I quickly copy-pasted the hand rig from my pirate model, ad set up some lighting, then bumped up the contrast, and he was looking great already!
The main things I wanted to try this week were shading, texturing, and redoing the hair for higher fidelity, and I think I accomplished all of those really well!
One thing I forgot to do from last week first, though: The tail rig! For this, I tried something new I really ended up liking. Each tail bone has a dampened track modifier set to the target bone, tapering the modifier strength to be increased more and more as the bones get closer to the tail controller on the far right.
The result is that I can move the controller bone to curve the tail similar to IK, but not limited to bending in a certain direction, and with the root bone being able to control the curve too. It keeps the tail a constant length as opposed to bendy bones, but allows for more freedom of movement compared to IK. The problem is that whipping motions aren't really easy to do with something like this, and I might actually add a driver bone to the controller to affect the modifier strengths to allow that to be possible.
To start this week's progress, I set up a shader inspired by Marvel Vs. Capcom 3, using both cel shading techniques for harsh shadow, and soft shading for highlights and specular.
The results so far were awesome! The harsh shadows are super dramatic and stylish, but you still get the surface detailing of a principled bsdf, with options for stuff like alpha transparency and other features.
The actual shader setup was very simple: Just attach a diffuse shader to the base color output, and you can darken the texture before applying the principled bsdf. This has the unintentional upshot of giving the harsh shadow the capability for catching reflected light, creating gradients and light dynamics in the shaded areas.
I also toyed with the idea of giving him a cartoon outline, which I really ended up liking, but I feel would've unnecessarily killed the poly count.
Then after that, it was just a matter of UV unwrapping and texturing!
The results were already looking pretty good! The only main gripes I had at this point were the metal shading on the arm and the overall lack of detail on the fur, but those are issues I can easily fix over the weekend (hopefully).
Next up, hair! For the hair, I used a new technique involving curves, based on a tutorial by YanSculpts, which made the process incredibly easy and customizable.
Basically, you have a curve for the hair strand, then curves for the hair cross sections. Then, you just make the hair strand curve use the cross section curve for it's object properties, and that's it!
And there it is! A strand of hair you can edit by just changing 4 points on a line!
And here it is! I love how grungy and messy it came out, really the vibe I was going for on this character, and I feel this really captures it.
Then to finish up, I edited the eye shape and textured them with a placeholder that I can take into Clip Studio Paint later, as well as added an eye control rig to have him look around during animation. This part was super easy and took maybe under 30 minutes total.
Here it is all coming together! Stanced up and ready to rock. His stance is actually based on Geese Howard from King of Fighters, since I felt it was such a powerful looking idle pose.
That's it for this week, next week is all about polishing the texture and getting it ready for export!
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