"What's with all the character updating?" (Patreon)

 Hello! I'll preface this by saying no, nobody's actually asked me this so far. I just feel that it would be nice to illuminate the subject a bit (and put some bits of trivia out there while I'm at it).

TL;DR: All my characters are saved as 3D files, and as things progress, sometimes I need to go back and update those files.

There. Now, a bit more depth to that, because you know I can never just leave it at the TL;DR...

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I like to think of my designs/characters as "generations", program versions if you will. Generation 1 was the first few characters I started making, pre-Paeratopa even. Generation 2 marked the start of Paeratopa as the characters' setting, changes in the style I used... Uzuri is a G2 character, on that note, and my current oldest design still "active". (even though I haven't used her in ages, whoops.) G3 is when I started establishing different species, like demons and vampires and all that fun stuff. And so on and so forth.

Currently, my characters are in what I would consider Generation 12, or possibly 12.5 to be precise (I'm still tweaking some things that are "baseline" for their designs, like general scale and all). G12 is mostly a marker for a lot of technical tweaks; it's the start of rendering my characters' profile images in a higher resolution, it's going further with some G11 changes in body shapes and all that. When I first started with a lot of these designs I was just aiming to make them look very anime-esque, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize I was honestly just making them look underage as a result. I'm doing my best to try and undo as much of that uncomfortable stuff as I can without discarding too much of the cute elements I love so much.

So, where does all this arbitrary generations stuff matter? Well, as mentioned in the TL;DR, I keep all my characters saved as individual scene files. If I want to do something with a character, all I need to do is load up that file and get straight to work, toss them into a scene, load them up with other characters, and so on. If I was a 2D artist, these would essentially be my reference sheets that also serve as bases to draw off of. Thing is, whenever I decide to do some changes that are big enough (by my standards) to warrant a generation change... that generally also means I've put all those existing files out-of-date. For example with G12, all my previous profile renders are too small; some of them still use those super-anime body shapes, in some cases they might even be older than some of the add-on models I'm now using, so they need to be re-built with the new stuff. A big example (which I have, for the most part, caught up on by now) is that a while back, I took the 3D tongue model I use and I added a whole bunch of extra detail shaping morphs into it. Some of the characters from prior to that still use the old model, identical at a glance but if I want to use them in a new scene? There's all these shaping options completely missing because I never updated their model.

I have a lot of characters. Too many, one could argue; there's probably about 50 by now, even higher if I start counting characters I've not rendered yet. It's a bit of an addiction, making new designs!
In truth, I haven't been making new characters anywhere near as frequently as I have in the past, but it's a roster that still keeps growing, and I really want to give each and every one of them a piece of the spotlight, or at the very least give them all the opportunity.

And there you go. You'll likely keep seeing character updates coming out every now and again, sometimes barely-visible changes from whatever renders I last posted of them, sometimes dramatic changes. Maybe a pose was too stiff, I've gotten a lot better at making those. Maybe I bought some new clothing models and decided they needed a new outfit. Or maybe I was perfectly happy with how they looked, and all that really changes is the image resolution and a bit of tweaking to their face.
Updating them all will likely be a project with no end, since who even knows if I'll finish all 50-ish before I get my hands on some new tool or have another style change and move along to G13. But there are a lot of characters I've left untouched for multiple years by this point, and one of my bigger goals for this year is getting all of them back to current standard so I can use them more!

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As a little addition... you can more easily browse through those current (G12) updated characters in the #character design tag on here, or if you just want to browse all the images without pesky text, I recently set up a Google Drive folder I'll be keeping updated too. Enjoy! :3