Gale 2.0 - Boring model update (Patreon)

Another thing that's kinda too simple to post to FA, but y'all might wanna know.

When I went to do that recent little animation with Gale, I discovered that an aspect of the way I created him made what I wanted to do impossible: for those in the know, here's what happened. I UV unwrapped his model before applying the mirror. This gave me effectively double the texture resolution and made several tricky areas to unwrap very easy, and for a while I thought I was really clever. Then I started trying to do the wetmapping thing and realized with this setup, I can't do anything to one side of his body without affecting the other, since it's just mirrored all the time.  If I kept it the way it was, I couldn't make one side of his face look wet without the other side also looking wet.  

Okay, back to common speak- what it boils down to is it forced me to re-unwrap and re-paint his colours on if I ever wanted to properly drench this guy in fluids. Which is a fair amount of work and I figured if I'm going in that deep, I might as well touch up a bunch of other stuff while I'm at it. I've been messing around with the materials I use on the fur and I think I've got something that reacts to lighting a little better now.

I also tweaked his actual mesh a little bit too, the most notable change being to his arms. They actually look somewhat arm like instead of just vaguely tube-shaped protrusions coming out of his shoulders. I also added a two-part shape key, which is kind of going back into lingo land, but what that means is effectively his arm will look pretty good all through action of bending, instead of looking good extended then being weird whenever it moves.

I also added a bit of a brushed look to his cage, just 'cause I thought it would look nice. Can't really see it here, but I think it's better than being perfectly smooth.  

His colours will need tweaking- I think I'll have to drop the saturation down a bit, he's looking slightly nuclear at the moment, and I'll have to do many more test renders to be sure the fur materials will behave in all lighting conditions, but as it is I'm feeling pretty good about this!

What does all this mean for you? Not much. Unless you look at them side by side you might not even have known I changed anything. What it means for -me- though is that he's all set up and ready to be put in a proper filthy animation involving lots of fluids flying around now. When that'll happen exactly I'm not sure, but he keeps eyeing that huge lion/dragon hybrid fella so I'm sure they'll end up getting together at some point....