Marge Simpson Preview

Hello all. Finally able to give an update on Marge here as the finish line is coming into view. Apologies that I've been a bit quiet over the past week as she's given me quite a bit of trouble.

What happened?

Well, essentially Marge is a character that is heavily different from the ones that I've done previously, and this meant that I had to learn a new technique if I wanted to accurately create her expressions.

Without going into too much technical detail, the expressions on a normal headmod can be made in an easier way by having the mesh geometry move in a straight line. This works because the curved surfaces of the eyes are not that exaggerated and it's imperceptible. For Marge however... Her eyes are really big and if I used the normal method her eyelids would clip through her eyeballs every time she blinked.

Luckily there is a way to get around this and it involves creating in-between "frames" for every expression that you want. Essentially you would add different states in-between the open and closing states, and that would make the blinking more realistic.

So I had a choice: Either sacrifice the accuracy greatly by making her eyes flat, or learn this new technique in order to accurately make her 3D model. Of course I chose the latter and it wasn't too bad learning how to do the in-betweens.

However the biggest problem came when I tried to export her expression from Blender. Basically Blender's exporter can't do the proper position and scale computation for the in-betweens and it led to the model being very messed up when the blinking occured.

After trying for hours and hours to fix it, and with the help of Enimaroah on Discord, I realized that it's just not possible to do this through Blender currently and my only solution was to switch to Maya.

So I had to learn how to do these in-betweens in Maya (which took a while) and as you can see in the second picture it finally works as intended <3.

And that's where I'm at now. I can finally start working on the expressions and tweaking her clothing. I don't want to give a release date because I don't know if more problems will arise, but I'll try to get her out before the end of the week.

Thank you so much for your support guys <3. And sorry that I couldn't get her out as soon as I wanted. Luckily this is good experience and it will expand my skills so that I can really create any type of character there is accurately, even if they are heavily stylized like this one.

Cheers!