BUILDING FINAL ASSETS [PART 1] (Patreon)

In this post I'm gonna be talking about "Autodesk Maya" and all the final assets I'm building for my first big Maya animation.

If you're a recent patron and you're not sure what I'm talking about, (or you haven't heard about "Maya" before) feel free to check this post instead: Huge News / What I've been working on.

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A couple of days ago I finished working on another character, a small woman!

In fact I've been working on finishing all the assets I need for my first big animation in Maya! (More news on the other assets very soon!)
As I've probably told you before, Maya is better than Poser, but this also requires a lot more work when it comes to building your own assets (especially custom/rigged characters!)

Here's a screenshot of this new character:

I did my best to build her fast, but again, these things take a lot of time!



Here are some GIFs demonstrating a small part of the process:

The usual rigging/skinning part:
(working on every limb and making sure that every bone deforms the skin naturally)

Working on facial animations:
(In this GIF I only recorded working on her mouth)

Texturing and making the clothes fit properly (getting rid of bad "seams")

What's special about this character is that I made some sort of a system that allows me to customize this same character inside Maya and get several different looking versions of her.

You may have noticed that every time I want to animate a new character in Maya, I usually need to do all the process of building, rigging, skinning and texturing all over again (and this wont change for my giantess characters, because they are way more detailed than tiny characters)

However, for small characters like this woman, I can now "customize" her with all the built in morphs and "skins"

Here's what I mean:
Her hair has several built in morphs (kinda like shapes that you can enable/disable or adjust)
Her body also has multiple morphs (fat, skinny, muscled, breast size, face shape, etc...) I can adjust these and make her body and face look completely different
She also has multiple skin textures as well as multiple cloth textures that can be combined (at the moment, only tribal/native style clothing)

Here are 3 examples of the exact same character:
(With some of the modifications that I just talked about)

This is exactly what I need for my next animation, because I'm planning to have a lot more tiny characters than usual (which is scary to animate!) and I need them all to look different ;)
I'm currently "upgrading" my previous male character (the one you see on the GIFs I recently finished) so he can also be edited and customized to look different.

So, have I finally built EVERYTHING I need for my first big Maya animation?
Not yet...   ^_^"    Because we still need the forest scene with a tiny human village in there! ;)

The good news is, I also just finished modeling/building the tiny village! (took me about a week, it has a lot of tiny houses and details!) and I might post a time-lapse video of the building process in a couple of days!
Right now I just need to finish working on the forest around it! And it definitely wont take long as I also made some decent progress on that!



"Part 2" of this update is coming very soon!
The time this stuff takes to build has honestly been stressing me out a lot. The responsibility of having to deliver more art every month (and simply not being able to) has been worrying me a lot, but I genuinely want this animation to look good and not cheap, therefore I really can't work on it any faster than I am at the moment (and my usual health issues haven't helped at all either...)
That's why once again I wanted to thank you for being so patient!
I'm almost there! Once I finish this new animation (and with all the things I've learned so far) my next projects should start coming much faster than this, and I'm doing my best to make the waiting worth it!

Thank you! ;)