Merry Christmas Update (Patreon)

Hey there! 

Been a long time again!

I hit another big milestone with my work two days ago, which is almost perfect timing. 

I unfortunately didn't yet have time to make animations and renders for the new features, but I will make a proper post detailing everything that I've done after the holidays. For now I want to give you a quick overview over the biggest ones.

I completely reworked my folder and project structure of my art process. The new one is a lot more streamlined with a lot of the guesswork eliminated. The new pipeline for character creation now involves 3 major steps: Shaping, Surfacing, Rigging. I wrote additional tools and scripts for shaping process, both for Blender and ZBrush. I optimized my library of assets, including a large selection of body parts I made which can be assembled into characters a lot faster than having to sculpt each one from scratch. 

I learned a lot of new programming concepts like nested decorators and incorporated them in my code. Also my code is now finally backed up on GitHub, so if something should break here, I can always get it back. 

The Blender specific modules are wrote now support even more possible scenarios and are much more general and stable.
They have also been upgraded to work with the new Blender 3.0 release and all its API changes.

I also improved and developed new tools for my rigging scripts, which resulted in a vast decrease of execution time, from a worst case of 1 hour to about 1 minute now. 

The face rig was improved, making it more stable, light weight, faster to set up, faster to pose, and it deforms the mesh a lot better.

Completely new functionality includes having wiggle support for the following body parts: Penis, butt, breasts, ears, tail.

Thickness controllers for the thighs and arms and belly have been added too.

Genitals can now be described via meshes, which results in more accurate and faster bone placement.

If there are any body parts that should deform like tails, that is now possible.

As for characters. I've finished my Renamon model, and am currently working on my Lucario. It's currently in the shaping phase, but it's coming together really well and really fast, which is exactly what I wanted to achieve.

In other news I also built myself a new computer with more storage, better CPU and GPU. So rendering images and animations will be faster from now on. Plus I learned a lot about the actual hardware part of computers.

As always, thank you so much for sticking with me <3 I really value your support as it helps me do this art for a living. And now that my pipeline is fully functioning I can get back to characters.

As mentioned, Lucario is currently the first one I'm testing out now. This will give me a time estimate for how long it will take to create a regular character, whose quality will be leagues better than anything I produced before.

I'm really looking forward to the new year and getting back to posting regularly again. I will very likely post renders here on Patreon first for a while to build up a collection I can draw upon when posting to social media.

And finally, I really want to wish each one of you a wonderful Christmas and holidays! Thank you so much again! You rock!

Picti <3