What you see here is my current progress in Blender Day 2, which is familiarizing myself with the tools (trust me, you don’t want to see Day 1 but in case you are curious CLICK HERE at your own risk WARNING! NOT WORKSAFE!!!). Yes, I’m trying to teach myself how to use Blender and model organic things in hopes of one day creating my own Anime Styled Characters to replace manual drawing Sprites and CG’s.
Just pretend it’s a Macrophage floating in some liquid stuff…
I hate to say this but I have pretty much exhausted and perfected everything I needed to produce “decent” looking BG’s using Sketchup and Photoshop. I have streamlined the process to the point that making a typical urban BG from scratch takes about 1 hour (sans rendering time) and another 20 minute or so for post processing. It’s so efficient to the point that it is now pretty much boring. Sure, it still doesn’t look as good as hand drawn BG’s but hey… instant BG… you can’t complain…
Despite the simplified 2 tone shading it still took me 8 hours to finalize this sprite and that contradicts my Quick, Cheap and Efficient way of doing things.
Unfortunately, drawing sprites and CG’s is still something that I still need to take care of manually. For those who are following me, you are very much familiar now that I put more emphasis on Speed, Efficiency and Quantity over Quality… and I have no choice… I’ve been working solo on my projects most of the time and unless I found myself willing collaboratives who can share my vision… I foresee that this will be the case in the future. It seems, I need to move on to 3D too when it comes to Character Sprite and CG Event Creation if I wanted to maximize what little time I have. Besides, focusing too much on producing quality OELVN’s is pretty much not on my interest since I don’t profit from them but rather do them for personal satisfaction and the sooner I can produce content the better for me so I can soak in all the feels… another thing is I no longer have the luxury of sitting down in one spot for half a day drawing something. That is no longer possible for me. So the quicker I learn how to accomplish this, the better…
Even the Japanese is slowly reverting to 3D characters. Efficient and can be done and edited cheaply and still look anime enough if done correctly.
Unlike Sketchup and Scenery, Organic Modeling is pretty much alien territory to me. I am raised and trained in AutoCAD and relying too much on Sketchup that I pretty much ignored other 3D modeling software and mastered only what I think I will be needing to accomplish things and that turned out to be a pretty bad decision leaving me unprepared for organic modeling.
It’s not like I’m running around without a plan. I have a pretty much straightforward agenda that goes like this…
● FAMILIARIZE with the TOOLS
● LEARN how to EFFICIENTLY MODEL basic organic things
● LEARN how to EFFICIENTLY MODEL anime styled CHARACTER
● LEARN how to TEXTURE and BAKE MAP anime style
● LEARN how to RIG
And that’s pretty much what I needed to learn to accomplish the task I needed to do. Anything else will be useless for I don’t intend on doing anything else other than the task I am currently focused on and that is replace Sprites and CG’s with 3D.
This will be a long and bumpy road. Who knows how far I can get… oh well…
And now we come to the juicy part… I the handsome UNCLE MUGEN has been quietly developing and refining my Sketchup BG making techniques. My main objective is to reduce the steps down to five and make a tutorial so everyone can make their own BG’s without much effort… so far so good I managed to bring it down to a safe 8… still 3 steps more than my ideal goal but I’m still working on it.
but I can give several hints on current projects running and completed ones that I haven’t had time to release properly (due to lack of music)…
