New Thing, Needs Name (Patreon)

(If you're only here to see the thing and suggest a name, just scroll down 'till you see it)

Inspiration is a weird thing. There are lots of models I want to make, things I've been talking about wanting to make for ages even, but that's not enough on it's own. For me at least, there needs to be that... je ne sais quoi. That spark.

It's hard to explain, but you know it when you feel it. Reading over all the suggestions thinking "Yeah, that could be fun... there's one I've been wanting to do for a while... that one's interesting... could use one of those..." and so on, and then I saw the suggestion for a bat, and it's like it walloped me over the head with a giant cartoon mallet. Sure, there's lots of stuff I wanted to make.

But I had to make a bat.

This feeling was only reinforced when I remembered that, technically, I already have a bat character. I seem to remember quite a few people liking her too! Gonna risk linking it here because it's pretty obvious she's having a damn good time here: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/27824478/

I know I don't really need any more small subby girls. We -really- could use some more on the bigger male side of things. I hopefully will get the inspiration to do that soon, but, don't forget what I just said. I had to make the bat. :P It was out of my control!

And so, I got started on making a bat, which if you remember, was mainly so I could test out my ideas for a new hair system using geometry nodes in blender. I got on with the model until it was basically ready for fur, and then got to work on putting together the fur system. I started with some built in stuff that's being added in version 3.5, but quickly discovered that it wasn't at all designed with animation in mind, and would straight up not work. But I am stubborn, and I wanted it. So I decided to try to make my own fur scattering system! One that wouldn't glitch out like crazy with a physics system hacked into it. After several days of messing around and trying stuff and furiously googling every problem I came across, I ended up with this:

Simple right? I know it's small, you're not really supposed to be able to read it. Just... bask in the nodes. Slurp up the delicious noodliness.

If you're the technical sort and you're curious, what this does is take a basic set of curves, duplicates it a bunch of times, converts the positions of the curves to UV positions on the object they're connected to, scatters those points around UV space, converts the now-scattered points back to positions in 3D space, and then translates the curves to those scattered points. I do it this way because the built-in fur duplicating methods have issues with fur sliding around on the surface under deformation... UV's however are always firmly rooted to the surface, and so the fur should be as well, no matter how the character moves around. There's also some protections built in in case the scattered curves falls outside any uv islands, or scatters far enough that it hits another island. Also lots of stuff in there to control the look and shape of the fur. Figuring all this shit out is, I think, one of the more technical and difficult things I've done in my life, haha. But I did it! And it only took me lots of days and suffering. :D

Anyway, once I had the fur, I needed a model to test it out on, and thus I introduce you to...

Bat.

Still in a bit of a larval state; there's a lot of texturing and detail that needs to be added before she's really done, lots of tweaking and improving of things, but she's got enough going on that she's ready to be shown, and can be given a name!

So, what do you think? How's she looking so far, and what should we call her?