Weekly Gaze - V - Heading for Heads (Patreon)

Heya! (I am not Imoen, and I always hated the character!)

It is time for yet another Weekly Gaze, and this week I'm going to show the first pass of the Faelain head :3 Passes are basically "steps" in the process of bringing them into the game, each pass basically focuses on different things. This pass was about getting the base head ready and textured, and then testing fur shader on it. But before we get to look at it, lets look at how we ended up to where we are now, shall we?

So, over the past few months I went through couple of artists to see what kind of work they do and if they would fit Hunt and Snare and commissioned a few heads from the ones I liked the most. I literally paid them to do a head in their style, without guiding them about style they should fit it to, because I wanted to test things, but in the end, I felt like it would be wrong to commission such an integral part of the art style from outside (I might add the commissioned heads as hidden statues or something like that later on, who knows xD) and Hareress sculpted me a kitty head from polymer clay. Originally it was more like they just wanted to see what kind of heads they could make, and I liked it a ton, so we ended up exploring Photogrammetry (3D scanning with photographs) ^^

After a dozen tests, thousand photos, and a handful of photogrammetry softwares later, we had a head!

[One profile photo of the sculpted head]

[Final set of photos used for the head scan]

[Scan result]

As you can see, it is fairly rough even compared to the source image, so I had to do some clean up in Mudbox to get rid of the surface noise. These scan results are so high polygon that they could never be used in a game, but you can use these as a base for retopology (to build a low polygon game mesh from high polygon source)

[One side of the scan is cleaned]

[Retopology has started (Note: I commissioned a friend of mine to build the low polygon mesh after all xD)]

[Finished retopologized mesh, a low polygon game quality mesh]

Once the low polygon mesh was done, I started tweaked and testing and changing and nudging things to find the perfect balance that would a) fit the body, b) look great.

[Went through a few iterations to find a good and balanced look]

And when finally we had a low polygon head that looked good to me, I made yet another version of it, because that's how I am... always needing to have the final word over myself xD 

The Skiian Faelain, subspecies of the island of Skiia felids (there will be other subspecies too), in Hunt and Snare are lynxes by canon, so they would normally have sideburns and ear tip hair, and I decided to model it in because it's easier to get good looking fur that way (some base form, supported by fur shader effects)

[F.U.R]

I cast this for voting, because I wanted to see which of the heads people would prefer. The supreme winner was type F, basically the base head, and the runner up was U, the lynx. Of course I went with U because that is canon for the first race, but the other types of kitties won't have lynx hair ^^ The option R, the alien child thing, was an afterthought, and it showed in the vote results x)

So I cleaned up the head further, smoothed some uneven spots, and started the texturing proces

[Texture stretching test]

[Sculped version details baked to low polygon game mesh]

And once those were done, I started properly texturing it in Substance Painter. Love that software :3

[Base texture with test pattern]

[How it looks in-game without fur]

[I went a bit overboard with mouth, oops]

And when the base mesh was ready and textured, I started testing fur shading. I tried different kinds of fur, fully covered, partially covered, coarse, soft... Here's a couple

[Fluffy gruffy]

[Old matt]

Finally ending up with "fur here and there, and oh wow it looks better than anything else I tried". And yes, the nose mohawk makes no sense, but I kinda like it xD

[fur here and there, and oh wow it looks better than anything else I tried]

I will eventually replace the eyes with something nicer and more kitty like, but it will take sometime before that is possible, and will come after the first head release ^^ 

Next up, I'm going to fix some issues with the body (I changed some things so that I had a bit more neck space in the future) and after that I'll start adding it into the game. There's still quite a few steps needed, including redoing parts of skins and animations, before it will be available in builds, but we're getting there! :3

In other news (the non-head news!):

Hareress is working on full acts, and once I'm done tweaking the current body, they'll start repainting skin patterns (ouch), and once heads are in game, they'll start fixing animations to fit with the new heads (OUCH!). Sorry! ^^'

Drathek ( https://beta.furrynetwork.com/drathek/ ) is currently helping ease up my workload by handling bug fixing and tweaking of systems, and soon they'll focus on new gameplay systems; First replacing the old movement system, and then starting to implement conversation system, gunplay, and inventory systems ^^

That's all for the Number V!

With luv,
Ruffleneck

edit: I knew I'd forget something! I guess this is something special for everyone who comes look at this through the page and not just the email xD

Doggy, Kitty, Horsy, Birdy, Dragon..y (which will have head attachments), and Foxy