#41 - rituals (remake)

For your convenience, I've also attached all of the remake (and original) as ZIPs.

The remake itself is from Sep. 2016.

This is probably the best remake out of all of my remakes so far that I can think of, though that's not really saying much.

Well let's go back to the original actually. You can probably tell as you open that ZIP that there's...not much there. Because it wasn't really much of a project to begin with. More like scrap and me messing around with Rexx's many assets back then.

So the remake ends up being more of a completion of the original project. Quite a bit of things were added or changed in the process.

The set is something I always particularly liked about this project. It's basically the same as the original, but with much more water. All of the water that you see is "fake". That means there's no actual liquids being rendered and simulated. They're all very basic 3D objects made to look like water. And I did some clever image editing to blend and conceal rough spots.

Though the water itself isn't "real" (if we're really going to be persnickety about how water "should" look), I think I did a good job matching how water looks in-game. I think the only thing I'm really missing are more particle effects (like water splashes), but for the most part, I think my water held up really, really well here. I was certainly very ambitious to try out something like that so early on in my creative journey.

Now I'm much less enthusiastic about the rest of the project.

My Orc's face is botched. This was around the time when I was still too reliant on using Rexx's morphs for facial expressions, rather than posing the face by myself. So I was just literally sliding sliders back and forth to get any kind of expression...and I hate it. IDK if I hated it then, but I certainly hate it now. I can't even pleasure myself with this project because of that ugly face. Big yikes.

The goat fares much better because I actually posed his face myself there; Rexx had no such morphs for his expressions (or his fatter body). But the "milk" that's all over the goat's body...doesn't look so great. I still struggle with drawing "milk", as you can probably tell, but this was one of my earliest forays in doing that. The results are....OK, but not that great. If nothing else, I really should've included a version without the "milk" in case it was too distracting, but alas, I didn't consider alternatives back then. And I no longer have the original files for this project, so we're all stuck with these images for good.

In the end, I think this project isn't that bad actually. There are some pretty major flaws from my perspective, but nothing that sinks the ship. I would consider remaking this again actually, though I dread having to do all of that water again. It's 2021; anything I do would have to be extra fancy. I would expect that of myself.