3d Model Process - Rainbowwing Fancyclaws (Patreon)

It's been a year since I started learning Blender and where I made the Vapour model. So I wanted to commemorate that by making another model.  So with Mechamaw and Vapour models available, who would make a sensible third character to create?  Perhaps Fang, or Erika. They would both enjoy smashy. Luca would be a nice option. Or what about Rainbowwing Fancyclaws? That makes sense right!

So, Who the heck is Rainbowwing Fancyclaws?

If you're not one of a few people, you've probably never even heard of this character. She was drawn by me in an extremely short period of time in Gartic Phone, a game where you're given a prompt, you draw it. Someone types what they see, the next person draws that. repeat.  I've played a lot of it with the group that I hang out at Confuzzled with and it's always a delight.  Anyway, at one point I was given the prompt "Sparkledog with Wings Flying" and I drew this. 

The rest as they say, his history, and she's appeared time and time again in many many gartic phone drawings, until she started to escape into other drawings too.

So for model it was now time for her to learn to walk on two legs!

Blocking Out the Character

I decided I want to look as feral as possible while still being a biped so that she'd work in Pawperty Damage. So i drew a quick picture up in Photoshop which I didn't bother refining this too much, it was just about getting the proportions close to what I wanted.  I already had a decent reference for her wings so I didn't bother putting much effort into those at this stage either. This was just about getting a quick feel for the character.

Then it was just a case of blocking out those shapes in Blender. These are all just cubes with a subdivision surface modifier on them which made them easy to manipulate and get into the right shape. Again I didn't bother with the feathers at this phase. I was planning to add those in later.

Sculpting the Character

After joining all the cubes together it was just a case of remeshing the character and sculpting things into approximately the right shape Again trying not to get too bogged down with details at this stage in the process..

I then retopologised earlier than I normally would here. adding in the paws and hands in the process.  As I was trying to do this as quickly as possible I used an auto retopology tool called Quad Remesher, which thanks to her quite basic shape at this point gave some quite nice results!  It would have been better if i'd done it manually, but the results were honestly really good. And I only needed to go in and edit a few loops to get a bit more detail in certain places like the nose.

Multiresolution Sculpting

With her back at 10k faces, now was the time to start adding the detail back in and also fixing up a bunch of the shape lost in the retopo. So using the multiresolution modifier I went in and increased it pass by pass to give her lots of detail.
The wings were also added here as single polygons which were all instanced.

You can see just how detailed the mesh is at this point in the multiresolution mesh by looking at the paws.  Also, her eyes, tongue and teeth were all added in. 

At this point I wanted to start adding cones of fluff to add to the face and ears. But I feared that adding them in the multiresolution would create some very extremely jagged edges in the low poly mesh.  As such, I modeled out a cone shape and duplicated it into various places along her face to give the illusion of floof. Also, for the wings I put in an alpha texture of a feather to make sure that my plan for the wings would work.

I also added in a quad for a tail which i just posed quickly to give an idea as to what I was wanting for her.

Baking and Texture Painting

This is where things got complicated! The first part was easy! That was transferring the normals data from the high resolution mesh to the low res mesh.  I simply UV unwrapped the low resolution mesh, and then baked them out.  I decided to use the level 1 mesh rather than the level 0 multiresolution mesh just to give myself more polygons to work with. 

As for her albedo colour, That's where things started to get more difficult! I tried playing around with colouring large swathes of colour and blending the colours together with Blender's texture painting tools but it was just too sloppy.  Trying in Photoshop gave smoother results, but I was never really able to clean up the seams in the UV very cleanly. As such, I decided to use more texture baking to get the results I would need.  By simply using a Texture Coordinate node of a null, calculating the distance  between the centre of that null and the position of the vertex, I could create a gradient in colour that way.

The result of the power node could then be pumped into the emit and that could be then baked.  This would give results like this, where the nearer an object is to the null the more white it was.

When this information was baked into a texture I could just then use it as an alpha mask on a layer of colour and overlay that over the texture. This give results like this. for the paws. Which I could then just repeat over the entire body.

Adding the stars was just done in blender using a star shaped texture stencil, but I used a secondary map which was mixed with screen allowing me to have that information stored seperately.  It also allowed me to erase things cleanly. without having to worry about breaking the gradient!

The other nice thing about keeping the stars in a seperate texture, is that that map could be just fed straight into the Emission, allowing her to blend in with the night sky!

Next up with the various transparency layers.  First up are the wings which are just a bunch of textured quads with a few subdivisions and a slight curl.

Then finally it was the eyelashes. Which were done in the same way, only using the blend transparency mode not the cut out as it gave nicer results for this.

Then after creating a quick roughness map, making her paws rough, her eyes super smooth, the mouth and teeth smooth, and adding in the shape of the stars to make them glossy but her fur matt the texturing phase was complete!

The final step was to add rigging. Which I did by just using blender's humanoid rig as a base and adding in bones for the wings, tail, hair and some for the fluff also.
After that it was just a matter of weight painting her and making sure all the bones are named correctly.

Importing into Pawperty Damage

From here, it was just a matter of bringing the model into Pawperty Damage which I won't cover in any detail here.  But the great news is that after a bit of tweaking and fixing things, she works great in the game.

And with that the model was complete! At least for Pawperty Damage.  I still want to make some tweaks to the model for use in blender and such, mostly in that she could probably do with having Inverse Kinematics and such set up for the rig.

Pawperty Damage Download Link

Are you interested in playing as a Sparkledog in Pawperty Damage? Good news! You can! Bad news,  you're as mad as me!  

Please don't give this link out to anyone!

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3135879739

Let me know what you think, and let me know if you'd like to see some renders of her big! I definitely want to see about making a feral version of the model for her also, but that'll come later down the line.