Roll Devblog (Patreon)

Ever get that feeling of deja vu? 

Well I did, and now I can actually explain why. So, when I was looking for the old Roll, I skimmed over what I wrote about her back then and the circumstances were somewhat similar. I posted both of them on the same month and they were cards that I was editing, stopped, and then picked them up again after some time. The hair bothered me a lot back then and it was even more of a pain this time around. I also fucked around with shaders to make sure the hair was uniform in color, although it backfired badly which I'll get into right now ish. 

The hair was as prickly to deal with as it looked. Admittedly a lot of the issues I had stemmed from the fact that I was trying to stick to the reference pics way too much. Not to mention I was leapfrogging between different artists' interpretations of the character so her hair just winded up being a mess. Yeah at certain angles, it matched up with the reference but turn it around a teensy weensy bit and  you can clearly see me trying to weld everything together so that it looks like a cohesive whole, rather than a bunch of parts haphazardly bolted together. 

Instead of realizing that I might be doing something wrong when the hair wasn't meshing together well with each other, I just did my best to cover it up. I did the exact same thing while I was editing early on, so again, deja vu, I ended up having to delete everything. 

I scewed with around with AnotherRamp (Which I think affects lighting?) and Detail Mask to make the hair pieces look uniform. DM worked just fine and for a bit, removing AR looked okay too...until I shifted the lighting a little bit. Then I realized how important it was to not turn that off as it lead to some horrid lighting issues. It took me a while to realize that as in the maker, the lighting was fixed so I didn't notice it. It was until when I decided to loaded into Free H to make sure everything was working that I noticed the problem. (It's quite useful as it allows you to see the character in motion at various angles n' what not. Stuff that may not be so obvious to notice while in the maker so it's always a good idea to run it to ensure that the various accessories n' clothes work as intended. Would be a real shame to put all that hard work in positioning stuff only for it to fly off the moment they turn their head slightlyy.) 

I still have no idea what it does, but turning it off darkened everything if the camera was slightly off. So I ended up having to go through and turning it back on for everything. Which thankfully wasn't nearly as tedious as I got rid of a bunch of the clutter that plagued the old version. It also helped that I decided to stick to one reference rather than several and my choice was muu/mumumer's artwork. I don't think they're one of the official illustrators, but fuck it I liked how they designed Roll so I went with it. 'Sides, it wasn't too far off the official stuff anyways so I wasn't too bothered by that.

What I did get bothered by was the fact that there's like, two versions of Roll's hair. One of them has these small bump things on each side of her bangs, while the other didn't have that. I was having problems with the former (Mainly it not lining up well with the rest of the hair.) so I ditched it and personally I like how her face isn't so cluttered anymore. 

Thanks to the new mods that while not exact, was pretty damn close to being a straight up model of Roll's hair. They helped to cut down the number of accessories I needed.  Material Editor n' Overlays were also an immense help this time around as I knew how they actually woredk instead of just assuming it was purely trial and error. I did have some problems where textures looked jaggy as fuck, but upon zooming in looked fine. The new clothes definitely helped too, though I did see an outfit that was a closer fit to what she looked like in the official art but it hasn't been released yet. Unfortunate, but hey when it does come out I'll be sure to use that. 

Speaking of new, I used a custom iris and eyeliner for this! ...okay yeah the uniquness of that worn off that didn't it. Uhh, oh I made certain clothes more glossier than usual by adjusting the shader! 

Alright alright, the actual dramatic change is that I'm a whole lot less uptight over proportions n' stuff. Not so loose that every gal from now on is going to have Nami's waist, but not so overly concerned over whether or not something is as biologically accurate as it should be. This shift in view was kickstarted by someone mentioning that I seemed to have a real fondness for the default body type. (I assume default in this case means sticking closer to life rather than KK's default because woof the latter is not great.) I was like "Yeah no duh how else you're supposed to do it." but it did make me second think about the way I modeled the body. 

I have fucked up on the body before and will continue to do so in the future, so being so ironclad over the idea of what the body should look like is kind of stupid. I mean we've all seen what that lead to eh? So yeah, after chipping away here n' there over my stance on how to make the body, I did make a major breakthrough. That being now you should see the shoulders being a lot less broad than usual. Also the shoulder, upper n' lower thickness has been adjusted as well as I'm not too focused on trying to see if all the organs could feasibly fit in the upper torso. 

Admittedly I'm still unsure whether or not this is the right way to go about it, but after seeing a lot of drawings and a shitton of hololive it's tough to just brush it off as "Ah they don't know what they're doing but I do because me smart bunga bunga." Y'know what they say, if it smells like shit no matter where you go, maybe it's you. So yeah,  please let me know if I'm making a step in the right direction or if I should reverse course. 

I'm a lot more willing to compromise on how the body should look like, but what I refuse to budge on is the bust. There will be no negotiations over this issue.(Sorry to the guy who wanted a more accurate bust for Roll.) I am however willing to overlook my personal biases over height and vocal pitch. As you can see, the new Roll is quite shorter than the old one as I've come to accept that a large number of anime characters are pretty damn short.

Seriously, slightly off topic but there's this gal named Selvaria from Valkyria Chronicles and she's this super powered Amazonian looking badass who fights with a giant laser drill. You'd think she'd be tall and in the cutscenes, she definitely looks that way but she's like the average height for an European. I mean yeah she'd still kick my ass super hard but the intimidation factor gets a bit kneecapped when you have to look down at the villain. 

But I digress, so instead of characters being way taller than they're supposed to be, they're now slightly taller than usual. Hey, baby steps man, baby steps. Vocal pitch is also going to increase as I've stopped using English voice acting as a reference point (shut up dont ask.) and thanks to Hololive, I am vastly more tolerant of high pitched voices now. 

In short, characters should look more accurate to what they actually look like rather than what I'd prefer them to look like. Not gonna be exactly 1 to 1 but closer than before. Lemme know what you think about this shift in body proportions in the comments. 

Well, that's all the stuff I changed, let's talk about what I didn't. Or rather what I wished I did, but didn't/half assed. 

So the classic Roll outfits are fine-ish, but I didn't test them all too much. Plus there's issues with their hair where you can see the seams that should've been filled in. Not to mention potential proportion issues where due to changing her face n' head, the hair can now look too big or too small. I did what I could to keep it proportional, but again, didn't test it too much so there's probably gonna be issues. Specifically, the early Roll design has issues that I'm not all too happy with. Hair pieces not meshing well together aside, I kind of want to redo it because something about the bangs feels off, like something's missing. 

I wish I made a better casual outfit than what was offered. I definitely should use Material Editor for her nightcap to reduce the amount of accessories used in her sleepover wear. This applies to her swimsuit alt but I think her hair should look a bit messier compared to her other alts.

That's all I can think of right now, so it's time to wrap this thing up eh? Not much else I wanna say other than I'm starting a lot earlier on cards and instead of underestimating the amount of time necessary to make them, I am now doing the opposite. Maybe it'll be overkill, but I want to avoid being late again and then having to make a mad dash to the finish line. Releasing an undercooked card isn't something that I want to make a habit of. I ain't saying going to make these things faster or to expect a card in the next few hours, just that I'm going to give myself a lot more leeway to make these things. 

I'll be coming back at ya next time with something new...or old. Til' then, see ya!