Started doing Blender things about a year ago (October 2024 was my first upload)
Used to use Anim8or because I was a 12 year old terrified of Blender’s UI and had an absolutely garbage computer, but hung up 3D art for little over a decade until last year.
First real project I took on was remaking Mich-Spich’s “Rose Sword”
(2024 Original remake)
Decided to revisit after a year’s time to act as a progress marker.
Face Closeup
Face Closeup with shapekeys active.
(How do you personally deal with the eyelid crease? Ideally can’t be a baked normal unless you have a separate wrinkle map driven by masking, cos you end up with that crease along the lid when it’s closed)
Procedural hair shader. Anisotropic metal specularity to simulate hair anisotropy, wave texture along curve UV driven bump map and alpha, Subsurface to give it some of that volumetric thing hair does.
Made some VDMs for this project. There should really be a “VDM baker” style bump baker cos I had NO undercuts and absolutely didn’t need this to be a VDM, but the setup for that VDM baker add-on is so much easier than rendering a fog pass to generate an alpha/bump brush
Eyes based roughly on J Hill’s realtime eyes tutorial (The one with the waterline and the lacrimal caruncle)
Teeth I made for another project and they kinda do the job I think.
Available for download here
Decimated the original for this, original’s a little high poly.
EYELASHES ARE THE DEVIL. Are cards common practice? I’ve tried grooming particles for them and every time I wanna rip my hair out irl. Cards with an empty alpha roughly in the shape of the lash work pretty well, but if this were for something close-up I think it wouldn’t hold up.
Eye isolated. Messed up with the sclera, was supposed to be the iris chunk, but I landed on the traditional approach to eyes rather than the way J hill split it in that one tutorial, really should circle around back so you can have the eye look around without reaching the end of the texture.
VDMs I made for this project specifically
Viewport preview (Solid)
Viewport preview (Wireframe)
Boots are obscene, I think it was an active multires with high preview count iirc, The actual model was relatively low poly, except the cape because I didn’t want to bake normals for that.
Everything done in blender except retopology. For that I used Topogun. Used to use Retopoflow, but it broke with updating blender so I decided to pivot to something 3rd party to avoid that in the future. Kinda wish I switched the nav shortcuts to industry standard in blender after doing that though it’s jarring flipping back and forth, having vanilla blender muscle memory is “!!!” in other software