Winnie | Animation test (Patreon)

Been working on a model for Winnie the past week! This is something I've been wanting to do for a long time, and I decided to start on it while collating feedback for Ersatz (which is complete, but needs some better editing, tweaks, refinement etc.) and preparing for the Kickstarter. Which mainly consists of making TikToks, not something I love doing but if you're a solo team then you're the marketing guy too. Still, Winnie's stuff will be my post-Ersatz project, so I'm not switching gears just yet, but it is my first break from Ersatz in over a year!

I'm very pleased with this model. It's super incomplete (missing clothes, braids, custom eye texture - just reused the ersatz eye model - facial rig, claws, etc...) But I'm happy with the foundation of it. It'll be a looong time before anything with this model is posted publicly.

I'm trying to depart from the Ersatz art-style somewhat with her model, which consists of harsher lines, visible paintstrokes and general grunginess. So this time, I went with a softer style, like she was drawn with pastel. I'm a huge fan of the artist Feeper (@gremuir), and was directly inspired by the way they draw portraits.

Winnie's fur is not a traditional hair particle system, but instanced paintstrokes. I use an extremely simple node setup to mimic iridescence. I played with a basic Winnie model sometime last year, this was when she was still blond before I'd redesigned her where I learnt to use this method of creating fur.

In this old draft model, I'd instanced some squiggly planes with a shader-to-rgb node on them to mimic scratchy, stylised fur. I didn't end up finishing this because it was just a test and I was busy with Ersatz, but I carried this method of using instanced objects onto the current model.

I'll have more to update once I'm out of the woods with Ersatz, but cool stuff is on the horizon!