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More places and some faces
🕑 Added 2023-07-30 16:48:51 +0000 UTCHello everyone, I'm going to show you some places that I haven't shown you yet. If you are already tired of this theme. scroll down, I'll deal with something more interesting later
Mika lives in an apartment in this small white building. Maybe she needs a little help from Brendon and Angel, or maybe there will be another character paying her a visit.
This is Wanda's studio building, which Brendon introduces himself to for his new job. I think this part of the script is very sexy, it deserves to be done with care.
The Campus where Nicole studies. It may not look like any campus you know, but there are many different campuses around the world, and this is one of them.
Nora's store in Oldtown.
Crankshaw family home, where Angel Crankshaw lives.
And the main house.
I've also gone ahead with setting up the interiors and adding more variety to the textures, but enough about the backgrounds for now, I want to talk about the characters.
From the beginning, I wanted to use hand-painted textures on the characters, but I believed that I would need to pay an artist to achieve this result. Before that was possible, I standardized the topology of the characters to fit Daz3D's textures, which are the same models used in most of the visual novels you might be familiar with. The problem is that these textures are made for realistic characters, not for cartoons.
I've been studying an alternative for weeks. My first attempt was to use filters to transform the textures I already had, but it didn't turn out very well. Then I tried to generate AI characters in different positions to put the parts together and form the textures. Like everything involving AI at the moment, it ended up being a lot of work and not very productive.
So I saw no alternative but to try to paint it myself. I dusted off my old Wacom Bamboo and prepared Penny to be painted in Blender.
The old texture had nothing I wanted to take advantage of so I filled in all the skin with a base color. Blender allows me to see the image flat, so it's not much different than painting in Photoshop, with the advantage of being able to rotate the image in all directions.
I liked the result on the face so I went on to the rest of the body. One advantage of painting the texture is being able to enhance the volume of the shapes, which I now see as a complementary part of the modeling work. And with a few strokes, we have a nipple.
The green eyes are also easy to do when trying for a cartoony result. And then I created a special brush to paint the freckles more easily, again it's very similar to what I would do in Photoshop.
I chose to start with Penny precisely because of the difficulty of freckles. In the end, the most difficult were the eyebrows and eyelashes, I preferred to do these parts in Gimp.
The result was far from perfect, but it's much better than I thought it would be, very good for a first try. Penny looks like a new girl. But all that matters is how it will look in the game in real-time. So I tried a before-and-after with the new texture.
Now, that did surprise me. I don't even know how I could find the old textures acceptable. 😲
But let's try to make it a little more difficult. One of the advantages of using textures from Daz is that I could use the tattoo packs. The downside is seeing the same tattoos in several other games. Besides, realistic tattoos don't match cartoon characters.
So I experimented with more cartoony tattoos. I overlay the drawings in Gimp and finished painting the details in Blender.
And that's how I redid the textures of the redheaded sisters. See the result in the video.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZdAnb6gynTrGffVgW9VLVu9a8c1HKyfp/view?usp=sharing
As you can imagine, I will have a long week repainting the other characters, but it will be worth it. I'm glad it worked out and I'm looking forward to seeing all the other characters with this new look.
Thanks a lot for your support. See you later.
Comments
MaliXe
Blender is an excellent program for many functions, I spent a lot of time training my modeling skills, but painting is new to me, I had doubts if I would be able to do it and I was very happy that it worked. I didn't explain it well, but the video is not pre-rendered, it's a video capture straight from the game editor, so this is exactly how the game will look, with the exception of the resolution and fps, because the video capture reduces the quality Thank you so much! It means a lot to hear that you appreciate my efforts. Your feedback motivates me to continue working hard and improving my skills.
Archy_TaxiWhy
Hello, s usual, you're giving us plenty of details about your progress. I hope you're finding some time for yourself in any case. I'm less keen on city records, but I have to admit that it has its charm and makes you want to get to know it better. It's true that the campus is quite original and atypical. I like the layout of the buildings, which gives the space a different dimension. The characters. What can I say to begin with? I find your mastery of Blender quite impressive, especially as I know a bit about the software and it's still quite hard to get to grips with. I find your approach to the subject very honourable and the fact that you've managed to create such a result shows that you've put in a titanic amount of work. I am more and more impressed by all your talents. It's clear that this has nothing to do with the old texture (which was acceptable to me), it's obvious that you're doing something right. I like the details of the eyes and the hair. I can't even imagine how difficult it was to create this texture. I can't wait to see the other characters with this texture, especially two of them that I'm not going to mention. Thank you for the video render which already gives a very good idea of the texture from several angles. I know that the result is not the same in game as in the Blender render, but it already announces very positive. I'm very curious to see the final result with my shaders and lights. Have a good week and take care of yourself :)
