Uh, Orville Update (Patreon)

Yknow back in the day I rarely modeled? I didn't have the knack for it. Especially with sculpting. Zbrush was and shall always be an abomination. And unfortunately, my computer isn't powerful enough to remesh this for sculpting in blender. So I'm going semi-old school and just retopologizing what I have. Although I won't be baking any normal map data. -- With this premade edge flow, I may be able to use this new model for sculpting and then shrinkwrap the whole thing. But we'll see.

The retopo itself is going far slower than I'd like. I'm using BForArtists, which is a fork of blender without all of the hotkey, right mouse click bullshit, and it's made getting into things WAY easier. Still, under the hood, its just vanilla Blender. So perhaps I'm missing a vital addon but what you see here with Orville's bust and shoulders is what was accomplished over TWO nights of trying to get the right poly flow.

This is part of the reason I was wasn't that big on modeling 10 years ago. I was an animator but my passion was rigging. I loved making control armatures for game characters, but I HATED how awful characters modelers were at making polyflows. Just braindead shit with ngons, spirals, and zero understanding of deformation zones. These characters are meant to MOVE goddamnit! -- And so I'd get really anal retentive over these things because ultimately their fuckups would become my problem further down the pipeline when it came time to skin* things.

* "Skin" is jargon for assigning or painting bone weights.

Back in my day, we were dealing with way less polygons, which meant that in theory this stuff should have been easier, bit it also meant that every quad counted. Nowadays you can just throw 10,000 tris at a game engine and people won't bat an eye, but I'd never want to make any character greater than 5,000 if I can help it. Although Orville here may be the first time I break that threshold.

The reason I keep saying uh... and um... etc. is because this is all very much an experiment for me. I've been out of the 3D ring for over a decade, and learning Blender has been an uphill battle for me as I've had to unlearn so much that I'd use in 3DS Max.

*Sigh* 3DS Max....

Fuck Autodesk

Hey you! You reading this right now! Do you know how much Blender costs? ... That's right, nothing. Blender is absolutely free! But do you want to know how much 3DS max costs these days? Here, go see for yourself. 

But 3DS Max was my first, and damn if I wasn't good at it. The retopo of Orville's boobies that's taken me 2 days? With 3DS Max, back in my prime I would have banged all this out during a lunch break. We're talking blazingly fast. I had the need for speed back then. And this was when we were still primarily box modeling!

My only plans are make a fully rigged and textured character model for Orville, really just to see how far I can go because I'm still super rusty. And because this is likely going to me an ongoing project, i'm going to take some periodic breaks to make some proper 2D artwork from time to time so you'll get more than just 3D Orville T-posing.

Thankyou for sticking around after last month. And if you have any comments about my current 3D ventures, please let me know down below :3