Weekly Wip Wednesday #9 (Patreon)

We're almost at 10! Wow anniversary time soon. What do you guys think about Blen-chan btw? I like her. Back on Tumblr I didn't wanna r63 the BK avatar cause I thought it'd be awkward but now I don't care anymore lol. 

So as you guys know I released an animation last week so that's most my work from last wednesday to this saturday, Idk I already showed you some behind the scenes stuff from it and I don't think the parts I didn't show were very exciting so I'll go right to the stuff I did this week instead. 

Last week I showed you guys my experiments with Noodls' hair. This week I redid her bangs again cause I thought they were too long on the sides and too symmetrical. Check out the new haircut: 

I think this one might be less traditionally feminine but I think it's more exciting to look at. The long side bangs would have been annoying to animate so I made them shorter and asymmetrical. I'll save the longer bangs for her in-game avatar which looks like this so far: 

I'm still not sure if this is the design I'll land on, but it's this kinda direction. I'm thinking either a fox girl or a dog girl, so I wanna add a tail too. For the game she'll be playing, I wanna be able to make a lot of scenery and fun stuff quickly, so I'm gonna be doing the 2D/3D style. It'll be fun to develop. Something like the recent animation I made thanking all the patrons! It'll be fun. 

Also I've been working on her rig. I  want it to be good so I can reuse it a lot when making other characters. Specifically her butt and genitals: 

This pose is always difficult. It's a known problem for us animators lol. The glutes are a surprisingly difficult muscle because they wrap around them selves when you bend over, and since there are other things between the butt cheeks (anus and vagina) they'll often get stretched too much if it's not rigged with that pose in mind. Here's an example from the Max model I used in the recent animation: 

I tried my best to twist the butt around so it would look nice from the angles you saw it. Since you never see the pussy from this angle you don't notice how bad it looks lol. Whenever I had to show the pussy from this angle earlier, I always had to play a lot of tricks. You guys will notice how difficult it is to make it look good when I release my models later. 

I've learned a lot since then though, and you'll notice even before I started fixing the ass rig it already looked a lot better than Max: 

(texture glitches on her labia minora cause I haven't unwrapped her properly yet)
So after fixing the geometry a little and adding armature for the butt cheeks, it looks like this: 

Then I iteratively added more bones and changed the geometry, fiddled around with the weight painting. These are the pics I saved underway:

In the end I think it turned out pretty natural looking. I could probably spend some more time smoothing it out but I think it looks good for now. 

I thought y'all would also appreciate a closeup of her Phat Bussy cause I spent some time on it: 

It looks truly cavernous doesn't it? This is basically the T-pose for the vagina. I added bones so you can close it up. In my earlier models I didn't add the vaginal walls, I just had it closed by default cause I was never gonna do a close-up of the inside anyways. But since this'll be released once I hit the next goal, I modeled the vagina with extra details so you guys can go crazy. 

This is also a classic problem! It's not difficult to hot fix with some extra bones. That thing you're seeing at her foot is a tracker, it'll make more sense when you see it with her suit on.

Before and after fix: 

Not perfect but definitely a lot better.
I'd also like to show you guys some of the finer detials I'll bake in from the high res version of her: 

Little touches like these are what's gonna make the model nice imo. To compare, here's her low res version: 

Now I'd say she's about ready to start texture work. I don't wanna put too many details in here cause I'm trying to avoid what I did with the Blonkers models which was going overboard with texture details and giving them an uncanny look. I will be adding pores etc to give her skin a better feeling of texture in close ups though. It's a fine line I'll have to play around with.

This also means I can start to work some more on her suit. The reason I waited with finalizing her suit is because it's basically just gonna be her body, but re-textured right? So I'm just gonna reuse her body's geometry and add the suit material I showed you guys earlier.  

That's a computer on her back for the headset, still working on the shape of that one. Next is gonna be her gloves and shoes, then her suit is pretty much ready and I can start working on casual outfits for her as well as more sets. She's almost done! You can probably expect some test poses of her soon.