#3d advice

[ironicsoap]

sometimes when I can't figure out how I want something to look with only a 2D drawing, I'll sketch it in grease pencil

[ironicsoap]

How do you do your mouths? they always seem to be very tricky for me, especially moving the teeth with the jaw for viseme blendshapes

Ooh! So, I have 2 separate workflows I do for mouths but they're both kinda the same workflow. Something that may help more than anything I'd write is my second youtube channel where I have some timelapses uploaded

Visemes first though before I get into modeling

for lip sync, the first thing I do is make an AA / Jaw open shape key. I set up an empty where I want the jaw rotation to be, and i set my 3D cursor there + set my transform pivot point to 3D cursor. (Knowing where to put the jaw rotation spot is kinda tricky and takes some fiddling around) Once I get the mouth where I'd like it to be, I rotate the teeth and other mouth parts as well on their own AA shape keys

After that I use AA to make the OH viseme, and I make the EE viseme. Then, I combine those three and do extra adjustments to create OO, FF, TH, CH, and PP/MM. You can do all lip sync from just those. For VRChat, I generate visemes in the CATS blender addon and then I delete any of the visemes it generated for ones I've already made (OO,FF,TH,CH,PP) and replace them with mine, because they look better than the auto generated

More info on modeling below!

I usually leave a bit of a gap between the lips. If the outlines don't fill that gap entirely, I make a mesh that fills in that spot

So for the actual modeling I have 2 methods:

The first and primary way I do things is I trace out the mouth outline from my refs with verts, and adjust it to match the front and side view

and i just start extruding and filling in until I get a head mesh

(btw this is @pumpoen's fursona/ref art)

the second way i do things is i make a super rough sculpt, and I retopologize it! But I also combine the retopologized mesh with my first method for the eye area, because I've found that I can't really get a sculpt perfectly accurate to a 2D ref

Hope this was helpful! Sorry If I didn't go into enough detail :o

[ironicsoap]

If your still answering blender stuffs, I've been incredibly curious on how you do your outlines!!! Specifically the colors fading depending on the color part. Is it done manually? Or is it a fun color shader??

The method I use for outlines is called the inverted hull method! Basically, it duplicates the original mesh, thickens it a bit, and inverts the normals so it renders behind the base mesh.

soo.. what do inverted normals do? Normals are basically how the computer understands where a face of geometry is pointing! all faces have an inside and an outside, and typically the inner face (back face) is made invisible, which is called backface culling

You can see how the blue face normal lines mostly all facing inwards on the flipped normals suzanne

So here's what the outlines look like with a little bit of shading!

I'm really careful with how I make my characters to where their shape is specifically curated to look good with outlines, I typically add outlines within the first hour or two of making a model 1: You can see here how the pink outlines blend in with some black parts that AREN'T outlines, but just meshes or part of the texture 2: This is what my outlines look like without any outline masking, they apply equally to everything. I use masking to change the thickness of the outline mesh! 3: This is what my outline mask looks like! I recently figured out how to bake this to a texture instead of just guesstimating it for Unity

These outlines aren't too hard to set up in Blender, they're just a solidify modifier with flipped normals and a black material. But I use the Outline Helper addon by Feline Entity to make adding them super quick

The way I have outlines in Unity is the exact same concept, but done in a shader (Poiyomi Toon) so it's more optimized than having a 2nd real mesh.. Don't ask me how its more optimized I'm not That smart 😔 Finally, I'm not really sure what you mean by colors fading? If this response didn't cover it, could you elaborate or link an example of my work where you see that effect so I could explain? :3

[ironicsoap]

Thank you so much for explaining how you do your lines!!! the color "fading" (which probably wasnt the best word), I was talking about was specifically how you got really vibrant outlines that change color depending on what part of the texture its over!! Ive only really ever seen models with one color outline, but theres quite a few shown here!

(first ask) ohhh! So, since the original mesh has been duplicated for outlines, the outline mesh can either share the same textures as the base mesh or use a new one. For this model I made a separate texture! (I think with this model in particular, pegasuskiss's character design and colors also really helped sell it!)

But when I made this ranch model, I mixed the base texture with another color on multiply mode

[ironicsoap]

How did you start getting into 3d modelling? Any advice for beginner software or projects? Do you need a really good computer?

How did you start getting into 3d modelling? I saw that not a lot of 3D animation memes existed, and wanted to fill in that niche (this is from a few years ago, there's plenty of 3D animation memes these days! but I was one of the very early creators.)

Any advice for beginner software or projects? For beginners, don't do big projects unless you're insane like me and you love the challenge. (3D is a special interest of mine) You want to do small things and get a consistent stream of small wins for motivation! Still challenge yourself, but not so much that learning 3D feels insurmountable. It's a completely new very complex medium of art to a beginner, it doesn't make sense to start out creating film quality models. (Although you can if you are determined. I did that LOL) Basically every person I've known that decided to do something huge decided to quit on 3D immediately. But one person I know actually took my advice of taking it slow and they are really improving and doing bigger and cooler projects every day :3

Do you need a really good computer? You only need a good computer if you want to do realistic/film quality stuff! Toony, chibi, and low poly stuff doesn't need an ultra gaming pc.

[lazer-t]

I wanna start off with saying your 3D art is so spectacular, it is genuinely inspiring! I love the animaloid models you make, they look so clean and refined yet so simple! Now, I have some memory issues but I think I remember you posting some stuff about the process you use in Blender. Any chance you can point me in the direction of that stuff? I've been wanting to learn Blender for years and think your work is the inspirational springboard I need. <3

Thank you so much for your lovely message, I do try and tag anything I post relating to my 3D process as #3d advice so hopefully there's something helpful for you in there! I have the tag set as one of my highlighted tags, so if you go to search on my blog on desktop or mobile, it should show up (in case the link doesn't work).

I do also have a couple of 3D process vids up on my YouTube channel, but they're very outdated. I keep meaning to record a newer 3D process video, but my 3D work takes a long time to make so a lot of the time it's just not practical for me to record and render 12+ hours of footage, and by the time the footage is sped up enough to make the video a reasonable, watchable length, the movement of the camera (I rotate the camera a LOT when I work) becomes so fast that it becomes unwatchable at 1000%+ speed.

[lazer-t]

How do you do moving eye textures when animating in blender? Is it a set of individual objects or is there a method of frame-by-frame animating textures themselves? (Asking because I've recently started out with modeling & animating in Blender, and a leg up would be helpful).

I actually change my method a lot depending on what I think works best for the model. Sometimes I use entire spheres (separate objects) for the eyeballs and animate them using a bone, like in the case of Talita:

I didn't show it in the gif, but her pupil size changes with a shapekey.

When I use this method, sometimes I use half-spheres to create the eyelids, like above, and sometimes I use shapekeys on the mesh itself, like on Tanto (whose eyeballs are still separate objects controlled by bones):

Another method I use when I'm going for a more toony, less physically realistic style is just purely using shapekeys to move vertexes around on a "flat" eye that is a part of the main body mesh, like I did with Swiftkill:

I believe there is a way to achieve a similar look with texture scaling/scrolling controlled by a driver, but I've never really looked into that method and my current ones work for what I'm trying to do.

[lazer-t]

Love the style of your models! I was curious if you manually rig them or use add ons like rigify to rig them?

Thank you!

I make my rigs "from scratch" in the sense that I make all the bones individually and custom for each model in blender. When it comes to weight painting I use blender's automatic weights as a starting point and modify from there manually until I'm happy with them.

I don't use any add-ons and my rigs aren't super sophisticated really, the craziest I'll go is using bone positions as drivers for shapekeys, and the odd IK leg/arm.