Indeed don’t be afraid to let the eyes go out of the head because you can cut them, they don’t really have to be closed spheres. What will then still need to be closed to avoid undesired shadow/light leaks is rather their sockets, so be sure those are just blown in from the continuous surface of the face. Then, if extreme rotations get too hard to reach, maybe some shape keys could be used for moving only the iris. Or some challenging approach could be to have those as a separate object rotating within closed and more physically filled white ovoids (different IOR for cristaline and white would be helpful). Better yet, have the irises depend 100% on their own bones of an armature be they separate objects or not.
the jaw line doesn’t need to move further out, just to have it more creased. as are clone war and Madagascar characters.
May I ask you what kind of references you used for the clothing?
As soon as I make the eyes non-spherical, all kinds of other things start looking weird. Also, I’d like to use this model in real-time applications in future, so I’d like to keep the rig as simple as possible, which includes simple spherical eyes, and minimum shape keys.
I think I’ll just leave it like this. I don’t think my eyes are anymore convergent than they’re in any other stylized face out there.
If I intended the model to be used for close-up animation I’d try to make it more convenient, but I think for my purposes this setup should be plenty enough.
As for references, she was originally meant to wear a classic school uniform (on the left), but I didn’t like it so I made it into a simple sweater… Why do you ask?
My reason for asking about references is that I like all your costumes a lot. They are quite diverse. and wondered about the process to find their original inspiration, such as browsing a catalogue /online shop, your own memories, etc.
I created a personality for each of the characters and worked with that. I used google and pinterest for inspiration and did 2D sketches. I’m not very good at drawing, but it’s enough to roughly see how things might look, and obviously you can iterate very quickly when drawing your concept art.
I hope to express the personality further through animation. We’ll see how that goes…
Btw, no need to be sorry, I really appreciate that you took time to look at my work and comment.
But more importantly, she’s all baked. Most materials are just emission shaders. That means she can run real-time, and I can import her into my little game project, or even just Sketchfab.
This thread is very informative, i like how you show different iterations of proportions and design etc. and nailing faces is very very very difficult across all art domains so you’ll have to treat it as its own separate monster. really looking forward to what comes out of this!
@Maurice_Raybaud Thanks a lot. I initially wanted to have at least one transparent hair layer, but that didn’t work. Eventually I looked at the new Kingdom Hearts game.
And figured that, with stylized hair, you really just have to play with the geometry and make fun shapes, rather than having lots of trasparent layers, which is what naughty dog does for instance.
I definitely want to improve on my hair in future. I do avoid particle hair as I think it generally looks bad, and obviously can’t be used in real-time stuff.
@pranavjitvirdi Glad you like it. I really enjoy making characters. I hope to master faces one day. Modeling faces that is. I’ll happily leave rigging and animation to others.
I tried rigging the face via the rigify addon, but the resulting rig was way too complex for my needs (and possibly the performance budget of javascript and WebGL).
I made a simple custom eye rig, and plan to make the facial expressions via shape keys.
Raluca’s coming along. I’ll try to play a lot more with shapes, give the face more depth, and figure out a different way to make the hair. Chloe’s hair didn’t come out the way I wanted it.
I spent a lot of time coding. The app is now pretty much ready for the characters, all I need is to animate them. I’m also figuring out real-time physics for clothes and all the loose floppy bits on the characters.
