Still a lot of work to do, but I want something to be myself in VR and such with!
So I've continued working on this over the last few days!
A large number of minor tweaks and optimizations have been made, and I have learnt a lot about the quirks of my own model.
In terms of what has been done since the last time:
- Reconstructed the Eyes completely
- They rotate in the socket perfectly now
- Skeleton construction and optimization
- Only 74 Bones!!!
- Full rigging/weight painting
- This took a really long time and isn't perfect
- But it's good enough!
- This took a really long time and isn't perfect
- UV seam setting and unwrapping
- I've done this too many times now
- Like way too many times trying different things omg
- Baked a tonne of different maps and tried different material workflows
- Got frustrated with all of them wasting about 5-8 hours of work
- At least I learnt a lot though
- Got frustrated with all of them wasting about 5-8 hours of work
So what still needs to be done?
- Applying all my mirror modifiers
- There are a lot of small reasons why I need to do this, but mostly just to make texturing easier later
- ...yes this means I'll likely have to redo my UVs again, but at least I'm fast at it now
- There are a lot of small reasons why I need to do this, but mostly just to make texturing easier later
- Make all my Shapekeys
- There are a lot of these to make (full list in the image)
- Texturing
- I'm going to be trying a "hand-painted" method I've researched a lot for this...
- ...but
- .
- If it doesn't work, I'm not wasting more time and I'll do my standard fallback UV Colour method I've used for previous models, even though it's less versatile
- Just because I know that I can finish it to a degree I'd be happy with
Once these tasks are done, the model will technically be as well, so I can do some finishing touches to
- Bring it into Unity for VRChat, as both a PC and Quest model
- Make some little animations with it
I have forgotten to log my time investment on this one, but from my estimates, I'm at about 26 hours so far, which... whew
Excited to see it done!
ps. having a checklist in Blender is a godsend please do this yourself
but it is also 1:25 am so I'm going straight to bed
sorry but you'll all have to wait for a write-up tomorrow when I haven't been hyper-focusing on texturing for 9+ hours
So the model is nice and finished!
She's fully texture painted, shape-keyed and overall just working great!
I spent a bit of time today porting her into VRChat and that's been a bit of an experience, but she's mostly working* now
- *I haven't been able to test in VR itself yet and I need to tweak a few things (mostly weight painting)
- BUT it's Medium quality on Quest, so that's a big achievement in itself!
Now that I have the model all put together, there is a short animated loop I want to make, but I've just finished my outline for that project and it's going to require me to model over 20 environmental assets + all the actual animation/lighting etc on top of that...
...so that's likely a ways off still
Regardless, I'm extremely happy with how this lil creature representation of me has turned out and I'm excited to produce art with her!