May 2022 update

Hello! I hope you guys are doing well! Thank you for your continued support, here's some stuff from May!

Animation Course.

This month I've finished a Squirrel run cycle!  https://youtu.be/nRLh2MmqtFU

This whole chapter from the course is about animating this little squirrel, First the run cycle, then an idle, then climbing, and bringing everything together in a little scene!

I've noticed that I tend to make animations a bit too fast to start with so I'll keep that in mind for the future. I also really struggled with the tail, so I'm looking forward to doing more Follow through/Overlapping stuff! [Link to a vid explaining that]

I'm starting to learn how not to feel overwhelmed with the graph editor. Like other art stuff, it's about the big picture first and then handling the details. Now I know to focus first on the curves with the biggest impact (IK= Location curves, FK= Rotation curves). With the focus of making nice curves to avoid the animation looking janky. I'm still battling with spacing and timing, but I'll only develop an eye for that with more practice and studying.  

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3D Model [Tekki].

Not much visible progress here, but I did a lot of tinkering and trying stuff out.

I really liked the shape of the hair before, with the back being more spiky and upwards. I thought it was a nice silhouette at the top [New one definitely looks better from all angles]. But I wanted to try something else because if the hairband would have the little crystals, they wouldn't stand out anymore because of the hair.

The previous front hair as well, I liked it but I kept struggling with the shape and topology. It also looked best without the side-head braid thingies.

The hairband is simple but I'm really happy with it. I would just polish it a bit. Maybe change the floating crystals later.

I'm not sure about the changes I did to the hair, there's a lot of little things I reeally liked from the previous ones, especially the front! I think the space between the rows of hair, and the sharp shapes were really appealing, so much that I was thinking of just removing the side hair thingies so it'd be more visible.

I dunno, I might keep tinkering with it, what do you guys think?

The teeth here are placeholders but I like the shape and size already. 

With the unfinished Karkat model from a while back I learned how to make pointy teeth look right to me. Zigzag, perfectly interlocking teeth work great in drawings, but in 3D they didn't feel so good, and the single big pointy tooth in the middle always bothered me.

So now I just try to base it a lot more on human teeth, and make the bottom row smaller to fit under or behind the top row. [I think it looks good since two front teeth IRL are also bigger already, so it doesn't clash too much if more teeth from the top row are bigger.]

I want to make the front teeth individual pieces, and then the molars and pre-molars a single piece. I want to be able to adjust the front teeth, make them a bit asymmetrical. Future asura characters would use the same teeth, and it would be easy to adjust those to make them feel more unique for each character.

I made some modifications to the body as well, I hope they will make a positive difference. While doing the shapekeys [so she'd growl and smile] for the mouth I did realize the laughlines were too wide and the crease didn't look too good. So I'm confident with that change. The boobs may not look like it but I did a lot of adjusting and trial and error. I decided to tinker with them because I was getting weird shadows. I think they look good, less blocky.

Other than that I just did the mouth cavity as well. When doing animation I definitely plan on paying close attention to the mouth so I wanted the lips to have thickness and look fleshy, and I'm happy with the result. 

Next on the To-do list: 

• Model the teeth.
• Make the tongue[I might grab the one from my previous asura model, since I liked the shape and thickness].
• Tinker a bit more with the hair.
• Finish the hairband [I think I'll go with fabric.. so I'd need to make folds and creases] 
• Figure out what I want to do with the eyelashes.. 

I think my options for the eyelashes are:

• Simple Piece
• Complex Piece
• Simple flat plane, with it's texture having transparency so 

The simple options I imagine would also be easier to rig. The plane can have a more complex shape without needing extra topology, but it won't have thickness like the other pieces.

I'll try them out and see what works best.

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Yearly Compilation.

Finally, this is more of a June update, but I plan on finally posting the 2021 art compilation on Gumroad later this month, I will send you guys a message with the 100% discount [free] link, so you can add it to your purchase library.