Lethe Devblog (Patreon)

This breakdown is going to be a bit foggy as this was something I made over the course of like, almost half a year? Now I know what you're thinking, "Oh you scallywag when will you ever learn to not bite more than you can chew?" Well, in this particular instance I would like to proudly state that was not the case this time. Instead of biting off more than I could chew, it was more like a bit off a piece, then spat it out because I got bored of eating it mid chew. Iunno bout you, but eating something half chewed sounds disgusting so I tried to avoid it. But a promise is a promise. It's like what Turbo Man said, always keep your promises motherfucker. 

Yeah that's why it took so long. Promised a bud to make Lethe then got bored five minutes in. I made this promise like nearly a year ago and kept putting it off so I didn't have the heart to do it again. However I didn't want to look like I was playing hooky either so I tried not to upload anything I couldn't just brush off as "ah lol it was just a quick thing i did no worries im still totally working on it." *Actually just practicing perfect judgement cuts* Also some other life stuff that happened that while would make for an excellent ice breaker, is also awfully personal so I don't want to talk about it. 

Anyways, onto to the breakdown, eh? 

I'll just say flat out Lethe is a creature of compromise. A lot of parts had to be jury rigged, rarely was anything plug and play. That's pretty old hat by now ain't it? So let's talk about how I made it harder for myself! 

I felt like Lethe was too easy, and so I wanted to go extra hard on it to make it a challenge worthy of my skill. So instead of opting for her much basic Tellius Series/Saga outfit, I went for her Heroes one. Y'know, the one with all dem patterns. I also decided to try my hand at shading because the last time I went to  Alvarna (Slide 1) for a commission, all I found was some dusty ol' skeleton. Dude's kicking off Halloween early this year it seems.

So like, I barely know how to do shading. I hardly even use it in my drawings either so needless to say I was flying blind here.  I was considering giving up then and there but I managed to bully myself in going forward. I mean, I DID ask for this so we're not going to leave until you  finish it dammit. I headed to the VG resource and used Lethe's in game model for PoR as a reference guide. 

I applied it in Koikatsu just as a test and I thought it didn't look too bad. (S2) Maybe if I touched it up I could make it work but I decided against it. As a side note, while looking for textures I came across an outfit I thought was so highly detailed and near idential to the original. Which was quite the feat as it wasn't even from a 3D model. Turns out the guy just copy pasted the image and used that as an overlay, hence why the back is oddly nonexistent. I'm not sure if that should be chided for laziness or applauded. Working in 3D is oddly similar to stage magic as I'll be demonstrating later. 

With a reference to work off, I started to make some progress. Since I elonganted the shirt through the skirt scale tab, I had to keep that in mind as that meant the texture would be stretched out as well. This is what the outfit looks like originally. (S3) Kinda looks like her shirt got shrunk in the wash eh? 

Not so bad eh? But look, it's all jaggedy. (S4) Usually, I'd just shrug my shoulders and brush it off, saying there was nothing I could do. But the look always bothered me and hey, I wanted a challenge, right? So I decided I would finally do something about it. 

CSP has this blur tool, right? (S5) Now, I have no idea what it does and I never used it before. I still have no idea what it's intended use is, but the first time I used it was think to make this shitpost.

(S6) Note: Please play Titanfall 2. 

Months after that, I was struggling to make Lethe's outfit not so pixelly. No idea what triggered it but I suddenly recalled "Hey remember when we made that dumb Botan shitpost? Didn't we use some kind of blur tool to smooth out the image?" Since nothing else was working, I figured why the hell not let's give this a whirl. (S7)

Hey would you look at that? Sure it's all blurry, but it's not as pixellated looking anymore. I called that a win and decided to go forward with this new approach. Although I'm curious, do you guys think this is a good trade off or would y'all prefer pixels over less blurry looking textures? Lemme know what you think. 

Also a small bonus, but adding blur + gaussian filter helps with these kind of pesky gaps. (S8) I guess the antialiasing added in by those filters plugs in the holes or something. Oh, and it also gets rid of these white outlines after making cutting/erasing something. It's quite the versatile tool that I'll be keeping on my belt from now on. Unless there's some huge critical flaw with it I'm not aware of. 

The shading's whatever, I want to talk about dumb magic bullshit. 

(S9) As you can plainly see here, the belt clearly doesn't form a loop but instead just punctures poor ol' Lethe here. With the blur tool, I managed to cover that gap up so you don't see it. (The original upload had this flaw still intact as I forgot to update that texture woops. It should be fixed now but if you do have that defective version, I guess that makes it special now eh?) Although I totally forgot to do the same for her back but like, who's gonna look behind there anyways? (S10) Not to mention it's usually covered up by her bags so you'll have to really go out of your way to find it. And hey, perfection is boring, so let's just say this is an intentional character flaw. Much like how Metal Gear REX's radome unit was deliberately designed to be a weakness except that I think a stinger missile to the anywhere would be more enough to take out Lethe. Unless Laguz are immune to explosives or some shit. 

Anyways, while that does cover that angle, the illusion's totally blown when her top is in the half off state. (S11) This is where the stage magic bullshitery comes in. Thanks to AccStateSync or ASS for short, (I really hope the acronym wasn't intentional so that this is just a hilarious unfortunate coincidence.) I can just set the bags to vamos when her top is half off...at least I thought that's how I set it. (S12) Turns out I just set it toggle to come off when her pants do, woops. Maybe I figured y'all would be busy looking at something else rather than what was going down there. That or AESTHETIC. 

But yeah, I feel like a big percentage of 3D work is stage magic Mickey Mouse bullshit. A lot of flaws can be worked around by either distracting the audience or shoving the flaws under a pile of blankets. And if it's too big to hide it under, just fucking toss that shit into the void. It's a lot of smoke and mirrors to be sure, but as long as you put on a good enough show everyone walks away happy.  Truly an industry where gaslighting is not only accepted, but encouraged. :v 

Enough about textures for now tho, let's talk about that bod. For the first time ever, I made a muscular character! (S13) ...not like there's much difference. But hey, it's something! I used Daemonius's character as a reference

I mean I don't think it's depicted too much in her official artwork, but I figured Lethe would at least have some lean muscle on her. I tried not to go too overboard with the muscles as I wanted to keep lean sprinter build look to her. Plus due to being inexperienced with making muscular characters, I didn't want to make some weird abomination that could pass for a Tyrant. Whaddoya y'all think, did I succeed or is it back to the drawing board? 

(S14) Side track but due to how the neck scarf thing was modeled, the bells ended up being bent which I feel like gives it a nice 3D-ish look. Or not. 

(S15) The eyes are nice n' all, but I wanna talk about the hair. More specifically, the gloss. I much preferred her NY Heroes Alt look, hence why her facial features takes after that design far more than the others. But I didn't want to stop there, so work began on replicating that design's hair gloss too. Technically this isn't my first foray into doing gloss as that was with Mio. (S16) But like, I feel like that hardly counts as that was more hair...pattern. Not very glossy in comparsion to Lethe's. Not much to say other than thank goodness for Paint.net's mass recolor adjustment tool as otherwise it would've been a pain applying the gloss effects all over again. Unlike with Mio where the gloss was only applied to like, 3 or so hairs, this was done for a whole bunch with Lethe. And a lot more brushes were applied as well so yeah...

This is why I make real damn certain the hair color is locked down before I even think about applying other effects to it. So imagine my despair when I thought I had it down pat until a bud of mine told me it was in fact, too yellow. Thankfully it was an easy fix due to the above and the doc said his hearing would recover eventually. So all's well that ends well! 

Whaddoya y'all think of the gloss. Should that be something I do for other characters or is this a one n' done deal? 

Her swimsuit was made by just overlaying underwear textures on top of each other. 

(S17) Alright fuck this peppermint pretzel. I think it's called a sabi or whatever but seriously screw this thing. There's like, only one item designed for it. Everything else fuck you make it yourself. Y'know for something that seems quite ubiqitious, there's oddly very little models or even pieces of it. Maybe the complexity of it's design is why there's barely any 3D models of it. It sure nearly filtered me I'll tell you that for sure. 

Here I was thinking I could just cannibalize Ayame's outfit for the thing, but turns out, folks just didn't bother replicating that part. Their laziness thwarted my laziness, curses! Techncially Evaan's Mai outfit does have it, but since it would require sacrificing the top outfit slot, I just had to try to jury rig something. 

The end result is this. Why is the tassels weirdly colored? Because the ponytails I used for the "tassels" coloring scheme was modeled in such a way that I couldn't do the alternating red/white pattern. I mean, I could for like, first third of the hair, but not for the rest. That would look rather off so I said fuck it, might as well be wrong in style rather than fumble around and churn out something that's technically right. I'd rather get the wrong but tasty dish instead of the thing I ordered that tastes shitty y'know what I mean? 

(S18) The braid circle thingies I used don't have left and right versions, hence why they look so weirdly misaligned. But I felt they were the best thing I could use for the rope thingies on her shoulders. I did say Lethe was a creature of compromise didn't I? 

(S19) Also that knot is totally piercing through her. That sleeve isn't attached to the main outfit either. But hey, as long as it's not noticeable during normal usage, where's the harm is how I placate the screaming perfectionist within me. 

(S20) I made these out of neckties! Yes I hate how it's clipping. 

(S21) These "berries" are made out of what look like to me BIONICLE parts. 

Oh hey this is the first time (I think) I ever used gradients for something. Looks pretty neat if I say so myself. 

There was a Muarim alt here. It's gone now. Yeah I was going to make an alt outfit based on Muarim (Remember that guy? No? Me neither.) and I got quite a bit far aways in, but like I got too lazy/just wanted to get this thing over with so I nixed it. Perhaps he'll get his chance, another day. *cough cough* muarim stans this is your cue all two of you. 

(S22) Oh right totally forgot but I set shoulder colliders to zero for Lethe's base outfit as otherwise they do this. 

All in all, while I did play around and experiment with it, doing some things I haven't tried before, it really shouldn't have taken so long. Maybe two months, most certainly not half a year. I think I learned some neat tricks that I can carry over to future cards, but iunno, what do you guys think? Should I implement these new fangled features to later cards or should this stay in the past as that weird phase you'll do your damnest to forget, only for your brain to bring it up when you're just trying get some sleep. 

Welp, hopefully next time I see y'all it won't take nearly a year! *knocks on wood* Til then, see ya!