Special Delivery v0.2.1 Development WIPs #2 - May 2024

Hey all!

Just a small WIP dump again, only 2 this time, mostly because I've spent a LOT of time lately overhauling my female human rigs and, in the process, rebuilding most of Des' model from scratch x.x

If you don't know who Faith is, she's my oldest standing original character and low-key the love of my creative life c: she's not part of Special Delivery, at least not yet, but I decided to take a slight detour in my development plans to shift from working on Des' new sections to re-vamping Faith's model. Why? Well, because she's the progenitor for my human female base, and updating her means opening up an easy pathway to update all of my human female characters, both present and future.

So I took a week or so to hammer out Faith's overhaul. It's all technical rigging stuff, quite boring I suppose, so I didn't bother to make WIPs for it. She looks identical at a glance, but under-the-hood she's now incredibly robust and capable of anything I might want to do with her :3 and now the same is also true of Des!

I took Faith's new base and used it to fully re-create Des' model. Because of unified UV spaces, it was quite simple and only took about 2 days to get her on the new rig. I also finally took the time to sort out her base outfit and get her shirt properly modelled under her blazer.

Over the past few days I've been re-posing and re-rendering her new sprite library. The old one may have imprinted on me, so it's hard to want to replace it, but I feel like the new variants better represent Des as a character. For one, the new sprites are shorter, which is more in-line with canonical heights, but they also show more of her youth, which I feel the older sprites didn't quite indicate well enough, and are a better reflection of her skin tone, which was also quite white-washed due to the bright lighting of my sprite rendering stages.

On top of redoing her existing sprites, I've also started creating her second library of just-shirt sprites, which will be used in parts of chapter 2. Considering the setting these will be used it, I've toned down the scowling harshness of the expressions a bit, and overall I'm very happy with how these new renders are shining their lights on Des' visual character <3

Also quite exciting (at least for me) is I'm trialing new types of sprites for when characters are sitting, or doing anything other than just standing c: since I have a few scenes in mind with this kind of setup, it's going to be nice to match the visuals to the scene properly.

Of course I'm also trying to keep the visual aspects of SD up to snuff, and so mindful, characterful renders for key scenes are still a thing. I threw in a little example of one such shot during this little office scene, because I'm very happy with how Des looks these days, especially with her new particle hair <3

Thanks for reading, will hopefully have more to show later this month!
Take care all <3