(no subject)

[kradeelav]

so today i kinda did nothing but start replying back to folks and texturing my model lol.
 

here's the fun model at the end of day. before round 3 of edits:

ignore the weird texture placements and the transparent glitch  I LOVE THIS. i would have NYOOMED into gamedev so much faster had you said 'krad krad krad you can make your own vtuber villainsona' LOL

NYEHEHEHEH....... i have a whole essays worth in me how literally every single vtuber model bores me to tears where'S THE HORNY EVIL ONES YO, YOU HAVE ALL OF YOUR IMAGINATION AT HAND AND YOU DON'T TURN YOURSELF INTO MILFY SEPHIROTHS? cough

- a n y way process time:

so i started this by sort of mentally mapping out the flat textures in my head after grabbing a bunch of references and remembering my mistakes in the sandbox texture map saga. COMPLEX areas need larger priority (ie faces), sometimes having a little bit of a gradient enormously helps it to not feel so samey (vagrant story shading on the characters especially, also see in the 256 challenge ref at the top).

sketching out the parts/materials...

(the fucking smarmy dreamworks face sends me into stitches everytime)
and here's what it looks like mostly lined up with the UV map:

this ... worked?  like, generally i was actually really pleased that more often than not they lined up with the model, the shading made it look like a cohesive unit, and i was only missing a few areas that i had given myself enough space to fill up on the flat textures. the expression is hilarious but i can make it work barring a few face tweaks, and it wasn't even particularly That Difficult.

that said i felt like it was missing chunks of interesting areas (the back of the model/robe was especially bare as shown above), and oh, here's my to-do list i made for myself for edits to touch up on:

- rectangle for hood on top of shoulders
- add hints of hood on back
- add spellbook belt for back
- add thick line detailing to horizontal lines
- make 3 test decals for expressions (haven't doe this yet)
- make detailing of robe with hips work
- make hair texture smaller but more detailed
- extrude back robe so two sided (haven't done this yet)
- make back-inside robe darker
- make top of face darker

a few hours later and i come back with. THIS :D

took a risk and used my watercolor brushes over a shit ton of parts with the overlay effect which gives it a really cool sheen that reminds me of majora's mask ngl. less that dusty or pastel or neon pixelated stylized textures, but something i could craft into My Style.

funny thing is that i'm slowly realizing that the glitch i've been seeing in exporting gifs/mp4's .... textures turns solid black (#000000) into transparency?? wat?  i need to do a few tests to see whether it's the SOLID black that's the issue or the solid BLACK (ie, i can fake it by literally tweaking it one shade of a pixel off). does minecraft not allow solid black or something, as a legacy glitch? weird.

so here's the other interesting thing: i don't think that blockbench can natively do expressions either. BUT i think i thought of a hack :D

so wind waker uses decals slapped on top for expressions, and i think FE:RD does too (because zihark's blinky expressions are in a different file than his face/clothes) - so if i make a separate file of just that line art style expressions, and then when it's time to animate it, i literally "hide" the unused expressions within the mass of the face, and when it's time to use them, you just nudge the appropriate one forward in space :D so like, blink_closed, blink_open, ANGRY_MOUTH, etc.

this reminds me of the cheap but wonderful hacks that gamedevs used in the past with limitations, i love it so much lol