Iris is a character I developed over the past 6 months to go through the process of developing a full character for animation. You can find the whole project and a link to download her on gumroad on Artstation: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/Qzoe1B
This has been a big project and I’m excited to call her finished. I started working on her about 6 months ago, and she’s kinda become a symbol of where I am as an artist. She kicked off a ton of learning and growing that I’ve been doing in the past 6 months… every part of the character has been a learning process, from the sculpting to the materials to the rigging to the modeling. There’s certainly a lot I would change, but I think this project deserves to be put to rest. At the bottom of the artstation page you can find the progression of the model from 6 months ago to today.
Sculpted, modeled, shadeded, lit, and rigged in Blender. Retopo was with the very powerful Retopoflow. Textures were started in blender’s texture paint mode, but then brought into photoshop because photoshop. Clothes are made in Marvelous, and clothing materials were made with a blender file made to render repeating cloth textures. Hair was created with curves, then converted to mesh for easy deformation and speed. Rendered in Cycles, using Blender 2.79.
Just wanted to add this to the story. Iris has been a massive project, and I’m learned so much from working on her. I’ve rebuilt her 6 ( and 1/2?) times… each time going back to my anatomy books trying to capture something accurate and appealing. Here’s the lifetime progess of Iris, all the major versions of her!
Oh hey! So much new stuff since i talked with u over reddit!
Man these are great, and this latest one really has some added natural qualities - feels like a person.
The clothes… Idk I was already amazed when i saw u did a sweater on one xD
Cheers, @bartv thanks for the feature. And thanks to everyone who liked it! I just updated the thumb, just cropped to be a nicer framing.
@dreammelter thanks! I actually still like the 5th version of her, but her face needed to change to be more expressive. Here’s the full render of that version!
@phei cheers mate! glad the renders feel natural. I put a lot of work into trying to get the face rig and expression feel good… I referenced a lot of Glen Keane’s character art.
Blenrig for 2.8 was released last week, and I took the opportunity to update the gumroad project with a 2.8 + Eevee version of Iris! Here’s what she looks like in Eevee!
What’s most fun about this character – all seven very-different versions of her – is that you’ve definitely developed the skill of presenting her as an actress, and of putting together stagings where she can give a “full-body performance” and make it work.
These progress pics are the single most encouraging thing to see as an artist when seeing a great final result like this. It’s a reminder that skill takes a lot of effort and failure. Great job and thanks for posting!
Very appealing character and the rig is great for posing but unfortunately too heavy for animation. got about 10-11 fps on my laptop. Agent327 rig return 24 fps easy, Spring rig returns 17 fps.
Good work!
