Anna Beanie WIP

- I haven't posted a WIP in some time so you've been probably wondering what I've been working on this past few days. Well it's a ... beanie ? Yeah, a damn beanie is sucking up all my time ...

- So I played Metro Exodus earlier this year and I liked Anna's character/model/look so I wanted to do something from it at some point in time. Flash forward to a couple of days ago and I decided that maybe now's the best time to do it. Went on some youtube/google reference hunt to find reference images from the game and I ended up finding the original highpoly/lowpoly renders from the original dev that worked on it ( take a look if you like staring at pretty 3d models, it's great work : 1 , 2 ).

- Looking at those, I thought it was great work in general, but I was very impressed with the wool stuff, sweater and beanie both looked excellent, so I picked the beanie, since it was quicker and I have plenty of tops to go around here. I thought to myself "heh, no problem, I can definitely achieve that".

- I couldn't achieve that. Wasted 2 days trying various techniques using photos, textures and combinations of the 2. Not only was I getting sub par results, the patterns didn't even match to the original. My stubbornness and ego hit epic proportions though and I finally cracked it by the end of day 2.

- Ended going with the nuclear option and straight up modeled the individual wool thread in a pattern that tiled.

- Baked that down to a height map texture, unwrapped the highpoly and applied it as displacement at a high scale. I finally got the depth and crisp results I wanted and the model is now looking comparable to the original with additional detail on top.

- A damn beanie had no business taking me 4 (5? I don't remember when I started) days, but it did. I probably could've modeled the entirety of the poll 6 in that time at medium rez. Was all of this worth it instead of me just putting a random wool 2d texture overlay and calling it done ? Probably not ... but I like it :) plus I get to keep the nice tiling maps I made for the next time I want to make something similar. That should go a lot smoother then.

- I still have to do the inverted wool lower piece and the belts before calling this done, but I'm going to take some time out tomorrow to release the Tech Bikini I've posted images of earlier this month so expect that sometime tomorrow.