Dark Moon's Weave

27th Live Lesson: Texturing the ears

Today we are finishing our handmade ears and tails with the texturing of the ears itself. After we added fur, textured it, now we are gonna texture the ears, play with the intensity of it and adjust the multi while we check the vanilla textures. showing also a nice and easy approach when you have no idea "how" you want to texture something.

26th Live Lesson Modeling combat boots Part 2

In this lesson we'll show first part of detailing pass on the boots - creating lacing (using Bezier curves) and sculpting in sole pattern details (using booleans and remesh).

25th Live Lesson: Advanced Modpacking all Tricks and Tips

Today we want to focus in Scher's course on something very specific following a popular request. Packing your finished modpack in TT with advanced setup. It will be shown the process in detail, how to pack efficiently, how to offer several versions and how you can pack IMC toggles. We will look at a gear mod and I will also show example wise different modpacks like hair and the overall approach how you keep your modpacks small and yet full with options.

24th Live Lesson: Modeling combat boots

In this lesson from Shana we'll cover first part of 3d boots model creation, this time focused on poly modeling. On next Shana's lesson we'll continue refining the shape, add lacing and start texturing.

23rd Live Lesson: Adding fur to ear meshes

Today we are mastering adding fur to our already made ear mesh. The method I am gonna show you is something I researched on my own and am still perfecting. This technique uses the groom technique and also uses their tools, all already included in Blender. I am showing you how to adjust the different hairs easily and we will also check each result in game fast, showing the difference between different approaches.

22nd Live Lesson: Creating High Heeled Shoes

In this lesson from Shana we show the process of modeling high heeled shoes by sculpting a base mesh and poly modeling over it.

21st Live Lesson: Creating cat ears and tail (Part 2)(adding fur)

Today we are mastering adding fur to our basic tail mesh. The method I am gonna show you is fool proof and only uses blender board materials, no need for any addons or additional things. We will also constantly check the meshes in game and see how the different methods can vary and create different styles for the tail. The blender setup file just as the cards will be added to the archive for the apprentice tier.

20th Live Lesson: Modeling/texturing lace and opacity painting (Part 2)

In the second part of the lace series we cover whole Substance Painter process and optional Ambient Occlusion in Xnormal. We show various types of projections, use of paint along path tool to create lace trims, warp projection for appliques and anchor points for removing overlaps.

18th Live Lesson: Modeling&texturing lace and hosiery (Part 1)

In this 2+ part course Dark will cover creating skin-tight meshes and texturing them using alphas, which is technique very useful for creating things like lace underwear or hosiery. In first part we cover the modeling (from scratch), using basic poly modeling and Shrink Wrap modifier.

19th Live Lesson: Creating cat ears and tail

In this new series I want to show you the mastery and arts of creating ears and tails. In this lesson we are focusing on the form, the model techniques and what things you need to keep in mind to get a clean UVs and also a nice topology so you can weight it well later. I am showing 3 general techniques how you can do this, which vary from beginner to intermediate.

17th Live Lesson: Vanilla Upscales (Part 2)

In this course part we will look more into editing the vanilla mesh rather than just upscaling. One very interesting technique I found to do that is the blender built in cloth physics which I noted last lesson in a short amount. Today we want to focus on that, showing you guys this time especially how to trouble shoot things, how to handle things not working and in the end what seams you need to keep connected so it all nicely simulated in the end!

16th Live Lesson: Useful Marvelous Designer Techniques (Halloween Special)

In this holiday special lesson we'll few important tools in Marvelous Designer to quickly get interesting shapes - mainly Elastic modifier and folding tools. We'll create few different types of collars and review the "inverse" workflow - creating a mesh in Blender then importing it to MD as an actual clothing pattern.

15th Live Lesson: Vanilla Upscales (Part 1)

Today we will look into the technique for upscales. We will prepare the mesh, clean it, then subdivide it and do some tips and tricks so you won't have weird smoothed chains, corners, etc. The technique is developed by me over a span of 3 years and allows you to create a first upscale in basically 15 minutes or less! At the end I will also share a specific technique with you which allows you to give your meshes even more realism without having to redo them.

14th Live Lesson: Low poly & baking belt

In this lesson from Shana we'll continue showcasing high poly to low poly workflow for hard surface models on example of the belt, starting with high poly made on a previous lesson and optimizing it and preparing for baking, including UV unwrapping and hard edges to get artifact-free sharp edges and bevels. We then do a quick texturing in Substance Painter and using Curve modifier place our low-poly belt on pants.

13th Live Lesson: Hair Porting (Part 3)

This lesson we face the king's discipline for hair: texturing.

I am showing you tips and trick on how to create normal maps, how to create, adjust and experiment with highlights and how you can use some "magic" to create split dyes for your hair. We also look in the new channel setup for hair materials since DT and experiment together with the new AO channel on the mask texture for hair!

New Youtube Guide out for all to learn!

Using the new improved cloth simulation in Blender has been a blast! I am showing you guys some tricks and tips I found out when I experimented with bishop sleeves which I use in general for my more medieval / phantasy orientated outfits. We will use the cloth simulation tab in Blender and learn how to make nice and easy realistic sleeves for all your phantasy needs!

October Theme

Would you guys like some halloween themed lessons or should we continue with the estimated projects we are doing right now?

12th Live Lesson: Belt for pants

In this lesson Shana showcases subdivision surface modeling techniques creating a high-poly belt (that will get retopo and UVs in next Shana lessons) for a good reminder in tradiditional 3d modeling that is still quite important . We cover things like supporting loops, edge flow, shading and modeling from reference. And curve modifier to wrap our thing around.

11th Live Lesson: Hair Porting (Part 2)

In this lesson we focus on everything model related. We will not only use the Penumbra Bridge for fast checking of the mesh and adjusting but will also add shapekey to the hair for hat compatibility and also will start with all racial models so the hair is race wide! We will also add and remove miqo'te ears to the export and set it all up correctly so you have as little work as possible!

Texturing the pants

In this lesson we continued working on our pants made in Marvelous Designer and retopologised in Blender - we quickly loaded it up in game and did general texturing process, including adding details like pockets straight in Substance Painter. In next lesson from Shana in 2 weeks we'll refine the textures and model additional details like a belt.

Ninth Live Lesson: Hair Porting (Theory, Fitting and weighting)

In this live lesson we start our journey into hair porting. Firstly we are looking at two mesh types from two games, seeing the differences, how we can check them and much more. Next main topic of this lesson is the fitting itself which we do, and the first general weighting. The two meshes with which I work also in here are provided in the Discord Classroom Chat and can simply be downloaded there.

Live Lesson: Making pants in Marvelous Designer

During the lesson we shown basics of Marvelous Designer and created simple skinny pants then shown the automatic retopology process with Quad Remesher and test bake in Substance Painter. After that we explored bit more of MD showing various variants of a circle skirt.

Marvelous Designer UI Introduction

In this tutorial we will present basics of Marvelous Designer user interface, overview of tools, sewing, simple circle skirt example and importing your own avatar.

It's made in preparation to upcoming live lesson where we create pants for our character in MD, retopology it in Blender using Quad Remesher and texture in Substance Painter, so you have general idea how program works beforehand.

Quick info on September live lessons

Hello everyone, with our first full month coming in this patreon we thought it would be a good idea to show you what we have in mind for this month.

Shana: Marvelous Designer, Workflow, Sewing, Pipeline Blender, Substance painter and TT import

Scherana: Porting Game Meshes, example here with a game hair model and an upscale of a Vanilla outfit to the Pythia3 sizes and additional edits / options

Seventh Live Lesson: Jewellery Making from Scratch

In this live action we look into the area of modelling jewellery, ne it armbands, necklaces or spikey stuff! We are especially using the array modifier with the curve modifier, learning about topology and how loopholes are important to give things "form", how to solve weird shadows and why we don't want to model a 120k vertices necklace but actually use baked chains!
For this live lesson you also get the gold material I used in here and I am sharing the link with you where you can download...

Next Live Lesson: Accessories and Jewellery

A short shout out for this week's live lesson, we will look into creating accessories, meaning mostly earrings, rings, bracelets, necklaces. I will try to give an overall overview of it, but if you have certain aspects (specific styles) you would love to have explained, please ping me with ideas in ⁠student-chat in the discord patreon corner! ❤️

Sixth Live Lesson: Texturing finalized corset model and basics of high poly baking

In this last lesson in the "Easy Top" series we'll cover adding new meshes to already textured project and simple example of low poly to high poly baking, utilizing assets Scherana made on previous lesson.

Fifth Live Lesson: Adding Details in Poly Modelling

Today we are looking more into poly modelling and less sculpting. We are creating a leather band for the arm, some gloves for the hands with the knife tool and also preparing some stuff we are gonna bake next lesson with Shana. Additionally we looked into adding button meshes to break up the silhouette a bit and looked into face snapping. Afterwards we also looked more into how we can do this manually.

Join the Discord

Don’t forget to join the Discord to get in touch with us concerning feedback, assets, helps and emergency calls.

Pythia 3 Devkit

If you want to try out our own body and working on it. The devkit has own shapekeys, full morphs, animations for testing.

Download: https://www.xivmodarchive.com/modid/112468

How to use video: https://youtu.be/sDWSBjtaEg4?si=WCvWde4o7srliTZS