Hey, what's Ru been up to? (Patreon)

This is mostly just going to be me blabbing on for ages about nothing terribly important, so if you don't care the tl;dr is not much but I'll try to get back to making stuff now. ---You might have noticed that aside from the monthly Patreon based painting/animation, I've been a little quiet for the last little while. As my supporters I feel like y'all deserve to know what I've been up to. As usual, I have no idea how to just fucking stop so a long period of silence is a good indication I've been working on something that's taking a while- unfortunately, it doesn't always mean I'm working on somethings successfully. I can get a little hyper focused on ideas sometimes and it can make it just about impossible to think about anything else. The latest culprit that I've been obsessing about is trying to find some way of making mesh based, stylized fur work well and look good. Currently I use particle based fur; if you don't know what that means it doesn't really matter, but the basic idea is that you actually render a bajillion little hairs just like real fur and that's what gives you the fluffy look. This can look pretty good, but it also causes a ton of limitations and problems that something more stylized like mesh-based fur (where the fur is literally built into the mesh of the character, like the way videogames do it typically) wouldn't have to deal with. I feel like it were done just right there's a lot of potential for mesh-based fur to look amazing, I can see it in my head, I've just... uh, never seen it done that well for real. It's so, so, so much harder to do mesh based fur well that I'm not sure I've ever seen an example I like. But I guess some little part of my brain thought hey, maybe I'm special, maybe I can make something work that nobody else has figured out yet. Turns out no, I am not special and I can not figure it out, lol. I sadly don't have much to show for all the time I've spent plucking away at it, most of the time my efforts resulted in going so nowhere so hard that I just didn't even get far enough to have anything to save. I seriously spent like two weeks just trying to find any technique for sculpting fur that I didn't absolutely hate and not making any headwind. However, after a lot of looking at references and experimenting around, I did get one example where I kinda thought, at least for a first attempt it might be worth trying to turn it into a thing to see how it looks finished, but I made it this far before throwing in the towel:

What are we looking at here? This is the retopology of a sculpt. Sculpting is a process that makes it relatively easy to get a mesh into whatever shape you want, but the underlying structure, the topology that sculpting creates, is a disaster.

All those little dots and lines, those are the topology of the mesh, and you simply cannot work with that. It has to be retopologized into something with the same shape but much more reasonable topology, and that's what we're seeing in the first picture. And y'know, I don't actually hate it, I think with some more practice it maybe could look pretty good, but I simply did not want to continue. It took me like two days of work to retopologize all those little tufts of fur, and that's just the face- I saw all the fur of the neck upcoming and just kinda... nope. Nope this is not tenable. Trying to do things this way would make every model I make take like a month or two to make. And it's not just the retopology, it's going to make every step of the process- unwrapping, texture painting, rigging (oh god the rigging) take so much longer... I just can't. And even if I could, there are parts of the body I have no idea how to make look good in this style. The shoulders for example, I don't think would look very good even retopologized, and yet I don't think they can just be left bare either. So, I dunno. Someone better than me could maybe pull it off but I don't think I can. The retopology was proving unreasonable, so I next thought about maybe doing it the other way around. Starting with a completed model and just kinda extruding some fur out of the existing mesh. This has the benefit of being massively faster, and not requiring me to remake all my existing models from the ground up. The downside is I have way less control over what I can do with the fur, and as a result can't make it look as good.

And yeah, I'm just not feeling it. With some better texture painting and other effects on top of it it could maybe look kinda okay, but I'm just not feeling it. I'm clearly spinning my wheels and getting nowhere, so I really need to set this to bed for now. That's honestly half of why I'm making this post- partially I feel y'all deserve to know what I'm doing, but partially because I think by officially making a post about it and calling it quits it'll help me snap out of my autistic hyperfixation and get back to actually doing something useful. SO. All that is a very long way of me saying, for the last little while I've been fucking around in blender trying to find a nice looking new style to play with, but I failed miserably and don't have anything to show for it. That's okay, failing is part of the process and maybe someday I'll work something out, but for now I just need to get back to doing productive things so I'm moving on. So with that in mind, who wants to see Vivian cream her cage again? It's been a while and I'm in a mood. That's the plan for tomorrow. :P