Next Mission… Organic 3D Modeling

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 just when I thought I got it right…

I don’t usually show rough or unfinished sketches here in me blog but what you see here is a totally revised sketch of Miko from Lamest of Lame OELVN… (a Tales of Lemma OELVN Parody)

So what happened here is that I already finished the sprite for Miko a week ago complete with color and expression (see here for the post)  and to my horror I actually draw her hair wrong… I was under the impression that it was a very fluffy ponytail but after looking at the CG of the original base material (Lemma’s Tales OELVN… aka Tales of Lemma OELVN) it was not a ponytail but rather a totally different style altogether…

And to add more pain, I accidentally saved a flattened PSD so no possible to edit without getting messy so it is I decided to make it draw from scratch altogether… Here, I preserved her petite body structure but less stronger more feminine pose compared to the previous Miko… she is cuter this way…

There is also very important fact that she was carrying a sports bag so I have a version where she carries a sports bag. This will delay me by a day or two but no problem… she is now cuter and prettier so trouble worth it…

“POOF” (Disappears)

Reusable trees are good but…

OK… I know I’m hell bent on streamlining on optimizing my workflow in creating BG’s and reusable trees is an integral part of it but you see…. after using and abusing the same tree template for 5 years in so many backgrounds and graphics… I too get sick and tired of looking at them…I need to try and do something fresh…

I know, I’ll try and draw trees manually… easy right?… Err… not quite…

I’ve been using and abusing the same set of template trees for so long that I haven’t drawn any trees manually and I’m beginning to wonder… do I still have what it takes to draw a tree… manually?… No use procrastinating and better get to work…

An hour later (which is a long time) I managed to make this in Photoshop 7… Hmm… Seems passable, not to mention I can manually change the colors and hue of either the leaves or the trunks since they are layered and independent to each other unlike the previous template which is nothing but tree images photoshopped to hell and back to make it look like hand drawn… maybe I should draw more trees manually… what do you think?…

Anyway, in case you wanted to use the Tree Template for whatever project you are doing, you can grab it HERE…

Just a tiny teaser… just a tiny one…

It’s almost time my friends… I’m glad to announce that all the graphical resources for The Fucking Question V2 is completed and is being compiled into the project to be thoroughly tested so we won’t repeat the same embarrassing mistake we had the last time…

So what to expect in version 2?… Well… of course there is the graphical updates, the larger resolution and more unreasonable amounts of animation here and there that will grab your systems resources by the balls and slow down your machine… Lol! Also present are the side stories, a “real” Q&A portion with input questions from anyone that is not me and finally answering the age old question… what is the relationship between Lucy and Uncle Mugen… are they friends? Are they lovers?… you will soon find out… Lol!…

Above is a sprite comparison between the old and the new sprites. While Boyet (Schoolgirl) closely resembles her previous sprite, Diego has undergone a radical change… gone are the hime-cut hairstyle in favor of the stereotypical perky girl generic anime style complete with ahegao ahoge (that dangling hair)

One interesting thing about this project is that while adding a few new nifty tricks… I uncovered an unexpected glitch in the Ren’py Tooltip where the Tooltip remains persistent in the screen after moving to a new menu and in what can be called a rare Uncle Mugen moment… I actually used my coconut to figure out a really ugly workaround to this problem. How ugly you ask? I filled the whole unused space of the screen with Null hotspots that displays an invisible image to override the previously shown Tooltip… Lol!… the game is now 100% slower on older machines!… Isn’t it great!?… OK that’s all for now… one last image to tease you my friends… Wha!… What!?… I’m fat!?… of course I’m fat now but this is 2008 Uncle Mugen… and back then I’m still lean and mean and handsome… oh wait… I’m still handsome… Lol!

“POOF” (Disappears)