A big Ahri Update (Patreon)

So, if a lot of you remember, a dear patron pledged a large amount to make Ahri from the League of Legends a possibility. The model was quickly formed, and this is a draft of her newest look, a sort of version 2. In addition to that, the Patron asked for an animation to be created, and I dedicated myself to that effort for the following 4 months -- something I thought would take a few weeks, took a few months.

I talked to other 3D modellers and engineers, I worked with people to try and make it work. The first thing I had to do was create her magnificent 9 tails, which was quite the endeavor on its own. Each tail has over 50,000 polygons after reductions, the original model each tail has over 150,000 polygons. To give you an idea, each tail had more polys than the actual Ahri model!

That completely crushed any chance of my computer animating this model. I spent weeks meticulously setting up the animation, and when I hit "go", the computer wheezed and died. Bear in mind, I have good equipment. Not great, but good.

So I referred to experts again, and found a way to reliably reduce the tails' polygon counts so animation was possible. I was able to finish that animation today - though it's nowhere near where I wanted it to be.

To give you an idea of the costs of this kind of work, the tails themselves cost over $200 in commission costs. The model took a couple of months to perfect, and I'm still working on her. The animation took all of 4 months to complete, working approximately 8 hours per week on the project.

As a result, I've pulled my commission tiers for now, as that project took away from a lot of other projects I could have done. I thank and appreciate that Patron for giving me such a huge challenge; I learned a LOT and realized in order to do animations in the future, I need to learn new software. No problem. Can't do it today, but I can do it eventually.

Enjoy the new look for Ahri, new art to come soon, and the animation (attached). Feel free to share the animation if you want to, just credit me and this page, because it is obviously not perfect.

AD