After some tweaks with texture seams (which is probably gonna keep happening they're everywhere) I think I can call this model basically feature-complete. Sure there's some textures I might want to clean up, maybe some tweaks to its expressions- maybe I'll even add a tail using hair, if I learn the way you do that in Unity- the point is, I'm at a stopping point. But while it's complete, it's not done.
Far from it, in fact.
Yeah the madness is gonna start now.
Look, I don't think I have to explain the whole wing and tail business to all of you again, in terms of how it's gonna roughly look at least. How I intend for it to go down is a different story. I've already got a lot of modeling knowledge- I roughly know how to do UV unwraps (I at least have a Discord thread talking about the workflow there pinned), have a lot of experience in texturing, and zero knowledge in rigging but hey I'll learn. By these factors combined I'll make wings and a tail, then promptly staple them to my ass. And that'll feel great, because that's another stopping point. I'll probably go back and do the mechanical details better after that, add all those pipes and plates I want, and, well, um, hrm.
That's about as much as can be done without starting to reeeeeally mess with the fundamentals of the model, which is a bit concerning because that probably represents a point of no return for going back into VRoid and editing how I usually do. I imagine Blender will be easy enough to use the same way once I get used to it, but as soon as I get to the hands and feet I'm going to have to start working out the minutia of editing not just their models but a lot of their rigging, in ways that hopefully don't break other things. That feels like a leap. And, well, after that, as happy as I am with the current face, I'm not satisfied.
VRoid doesn't really let you move the eyes/mouth quite like I need them to. Northy's mouth, like, physically sits at an upwards angle, hence why I draw her with such a curved smile- not that I think expressions on a cartoon character need a lot of scientific rigor, but this is especially important for her because it's distinctly reptilian. VRoid doesn't let you do that- the corners of the mouth cannot go as far upwards and backwards as I want, and if they go too far sideways they move off of the face. Likewise there's a lot of effect that her cheeks are supposed to have on her eye, blocking out the bottom-outside corner of it when she smiles. VRoid doesn't let you do that- you have no direct control over the lower eyelid and efforts to make it look smilier actually kind of have the opposite effect with how it's all set up.
Because of this, while I think I've done well overall, I'm running into the borders of what can and can't be done in VRoid. It leaves me wondering, kind of concerned, how far I can get before I have to do the undertaking of remodeling the whole face from scratch?
I intend to do that eventually. It's my goal to one day have a big debut and the centerpiece of it will be a new, from-scratch model. But as I keep finding things to change, it feels like the day I'm gonna have to do that might be coming sooner than I'll be able to get good at that, sooner than I can practically deliver on it. I like this model, but how long is it gonna last? Can I just slap some additional bones on it, adjust a few polygons, and keep on trucking for the duration of this limbo I'm in, unable to consistently work or stream? Or is it not gonna last that long for me?
In any case, I think the next step is the ref, and I have bad news: I don't think I can bring the ref up to date without doing something weird. It's actually at quite a low resolution and I'm worried if just resizing everything to a bigger canvas and cleaning it up will actually be less work than just redoing it. The face is way too small to fit the strangely more cartoonish but I guess more complex features I've got now and the head- by extension, everything- has to be bigger to compensate. It kind of sucks with how long the ref has been taking me- I haven't been working diligently, if I was it would probably have been done before I could have that problem, but the amount of hours is still a lot. And so many layers. I know a lot of layers is normal and I'm gonna have to get used to that but wow it was a lot of layers, like I really need to think about where to put the layer popout to keep it navigable as I do more and more complex projects. That's ultimately how the last attempt went, too. But I need a more holistic, deeply thought out rendition to go off of, figuring out how all the parts should look, before I get back into the more advanced modeling. I'll probably either make separate views for the face with a vastly simplified version on the main three-view full-body image, or else salvage what I can and start from the top, and hope that I don't decide to rebrand as a proper harpy for the sake of simplicity before I get there. Whatever happens, it's probably gonna get a bit weird from here on out.
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