Beginning Head Mesh Rework (Patreon)

Demo day was a big success thank you all who participated. The majority of the short playthrough videos you guys shared involved throwing her off the map. Was amusing. I am back on development. Working on revamping Shinobu's head mesh.

Her current head mesh was cute but I don't think it had the right Shinobu feel. Namely she did not have enough of a Shinobu look when angry. The following image shows the current head mesh from demo day. The eyelashes were too round and didn't give out enough emotion. The main culprit was that these blendshapes were modeled with subdivision turned on.

This next image shows the angry emotion in the new head mesh. Sharp angles in design are better suited for strong emotions like anger. Her eyelashes are not yet colored and need some tweaking so they don't look too unkempt. I also plan to add anger wrinkles that will blend in on top of her face shader.

Another big reason for a rework were her eyes. For a long time I've been using squashed spheres to fit eyeballs into her anime shaped eye sockets to compromise for the non spherical eye socket shape. The problem is that eye sockets in anime characters don't actually fit a spherical eyeball. It just looks like it because anime physics are wacky. So I went around this by squashing the eye ball sphere. This lead to numerous problems with her eye look at logic namely causing inaccurate look at quaternions when looking up. So this new head mesh will get rid of eyeballs and eyesockets all together and replace them with a poly fill that will be UV mapped with the pupil texture. Video 1 shows the old squashed eyeball method. A last minor rework in the new head mesh is a jaw. She was too cartoony with a round head so this should help her look better. Before and after with a jaw:

Overall this new rework will definitely make her look a lot more Shinobu like. Less 'dere' and more 'tsun'.

Also there is now a twitter for short updates! https://twitter.com/devshinobu