Horse Final Draft

Here's a final draft version of the horse model I've working on, off and on for the past month.

This is one of those projects that was like pulling teeth every step of the way. I just had so much difficulty with it and I'm not even sure why. I had a hard time forcing myself to work on it and every step just felt like the wrong one. I think I'm at a stage where I have enough knowledge to build a character, but not enough to do it properly, or fast. Unfortunately with projects like that, the only way to free yourself from them and move forward and hopefully do better is to just keep pushing until it's done.

This is basically finished for now though. I still need to make a c0ck for him. And he still needs to be rigged. I might end up re-doing the hair because I'm not sure if physics are supported yet on geometry-nodes-based hair systems. I also find the geo nodes system significantly harder to use and less intuitive than the particle based hair system. So I might just go back to that for future projects, I'm not sure.

Another difficulty: for this project and for the robot arm, I tried using Blender's built in texture painting tools to texture them. I figured if I can learn those tools then maybe I can get rid of Substance Painter and save a little money. But whoo boy. Blender's tools just aren't there yet. I think I gave them a fair shake and I learned a lot. But texture paint mode is so buggy and slow. I kept running into tons of issues and the end result still wasn't as nice as I could've done in Substance Painter in probably half the time. So I'm going to stick with SP for now for future models.

That said, texture painting does have some quite nice uses. It's great for painting quick masks and things to mix textures together, or just for quick touch-ups. On this particular model, I used anistropy to get that sheen look on the horse to give the impression of fur without actually putting fur all over him. But since you don't want that sheen on every part of the body, I ended up painting an anistropy map to vary the strength of it, so places like the hooves, hands or junk doesn't have it while the chest, arms and face do. Doing that in Blender is fine because the map doesn't need to be particularly detailed to still control the effect. It's good to know the tools, but it is kind of a bummer that they're not really good enough yet to do more detailed modeling.