Ah, so, so much for weekly updates, I guess? Life is just overwhelming right now, and my spare time has been consumed by a new, different video game obsession (shoutout to everyone else sinking countless hours into roaming Night City). Still, I’m here, and this project isn’t dead, just sleeping.
Last time I updated, I shared with you the progress I’d made on assembling Annabelle, and this time I’m bringing you Bessie. Modeled by our lovely gray, generic model, we’ve got two outfits and a hairstyle. This is, of course, all fun speculative fanwork; no files exist that I’ve found for Bessie, though I have paid mind to the single in-game photo we have of her.
The first outfit is more of a daily, out-and-about sort of deal. Nothing fancy, just the sort of well-put-together but simple thing I imagine would suit her, as well as a version with a sweater. I picture her as frequently cold, for some reason? So it seemed a shame to leave her without something to keep cozy. The single photo we have of her, small as it is, seems to show her as modest and fairly stuffy, but I think that may be more a product of the photography situation at the time than her personality, so I’ve kept the general modesty and leaned into simply keeping her stylish and more traditionally feminine. I’ve also stolen the necklace from that photo, as it seemed a nice detail to keep.
The second outfit is for around camp, in the early mornings and late fireside evenings. We have no way of saying for sure whether she actually traveled with the gang, but I like to imagine she did for a time, long enough for both Arthur and John to get to know and love her as a sort of motherly figure, long enough for there to have been plenty of shared complaints and jokes between her, Annabelle, and Susan. Still, even if she was traveling with the gang, I wanted to keep that extra layer of modesty and style, a few nicer things here and there to signify that she does come from a different world and that Hosea was taking good care of her, so I’ve given her a rather pretty overcoat to keep the chill off and some extra lacy trim on her chemise. Little details, but they just seemed right to add.
I’ve kept her hair light, as per the photo we have of her, and given her the bangs she’s shown with, but otherwise I went with a simpler hairstyle. Again, I’m trying to walk that line between modest, feminine, well-kept and also, well, practical. I figure Bessie must have had practicality in spades, to deal with how Hosea lived his life, and so I wanted to reflect that in her look, too.
Summary
Outfits and hairstyle mesh assembled and textured for Bessie.
As an aside, I super appreciate any messages, whether they’re comments or inquiries, that folks want to send. It’s really nice to hear what folks are thinking, and it keeps me motivated!
Not a whole lot of progress happening right now, as life is wildly busy in a lot of weird ways. In place of anything more meaningful, I thought I might as well share the little bit of work that I’ve gotten done on Annabelle. A reminder, of course, that this is all fun, speculative work; there aren’t any files for Annabelle.
As modeled by a lovely bland, featureless grey mesh, I’ve put together two outfits for her, each with two minor variants. The first outfit is more suited toward daywear, out and about, perhaps even running a job; it has variants with the vest buttoned or unbuttoned. The second outfit is intended as a sort of camp outfit, more appropriate for the evening around the campfire or early morning around the coffee pot; one variant with and one without a shawl.
For the textures, I couldn’t just pull files straight from game’s NPCs, as most of the textures are in a sort of neon RGB format that I think must require some metadata to appear correctly in-game. So, the textures work, but they largely need to be recolored. In most cases, I colorized them with generally muted colors, and for a few lucky items that had readily usable textures, I stuck with the colors already available in the game files. I may go back and give the vest a recolor, and her corset lacings need to be darkened, but I think I’m largely happy with it all.
For her hairstyle, there are again two variants; one is pulled back to keep out of her way, the other is loose and comfortable for downtime. I’ve gone for a red-brown color for her hair, mostly due to a headcanon I’ve had for a while about Molly looking just a touch like Annabelle. It’s all speculative anyhow, so it seems as fair as any guess.
It’s inevitable that my headcanons about Annabelle will get caught up in her design for renders, especially seeing as how we know next to nothing about her. Already some thoughts I have on her role are evident in the outfits I’ve put together; she has clothes suitable for gunslinging and robbing alongside the boys. I’ll talk more about how I see her as I get more work done, of course.
Summary
Outfit and hairstyles meshes assembled and textured for Annabelle.
Because I’ve gotten a few comments/questions asking about the other projects I’ve mentioned, and also for the purpose of giving myself some clear goals to work toward, I want to nail down the direction(s) that this project is probably headed. Excuse the gratuitous detail, but as is likely becoming clear from my posts, that’s how I work best :p
Project 1: Arthur’s Hidden Family
Goal 1: Finding Eliza -
Accomplished, largely, so hurrah for that. There was a lot of background work to get to this point, even beyond the details I gave in the most recent post about it, so I am beyond glad to have finally gotten it done. This step has already laid a lot of the groundwork for future steps. And also, I’m just happy to finally have a face for her.
Goal 2: Conjuring up Isaac - No progress thus far, but I’ve done some planning on how I want to handle this. No files exist for Isaac, at least not that I’ve been able to find thus far, so any models/textures for him would be entirely non-canon/custom work. There’s no element of bringing hidden assets to light here, like there was with Eliza; having a workable model for Isaac would be purely for my own heart’s sake, and for the sake of being able to do fanart renders involving him. This probably involves:
Using Jack (4 yrs old) as a base model, as I’m not talented or experienced enough to sculpt these models from scratch. Facial features would need to be altered to find a resemblance to both Arthur and Eliza.
Digging through the files to see if there are even other young children in the game to draw assets from - Arthur Londonderry’s son comes to mind, but I’m not sure if he’s the right age range, and I’m honestly drawing a blank beyond that. If anyone remembers seeing any kids in the game, please drop me a note as to where you saw them.
Possibly resizing/altering adult NPC assets such as hairstyles in order to give Isaac a fitting and unique appearance. This sounds like a headache, but may be reasonable enough to do. We shall see.
Lots of custom texture work, largely for his face, which will be especially hard/dicey if there aren’t other children’s models to borrow textures from.
Goal 3: Finding the Time - Less technical and more research-oriented, I need to nail down a timeline that I’m personally happy with with regards to when in Arthur’s life the events with Eliza and Isaac occurred. Once this is done, it’ll make it easier to decide what to do with Arthur in any renders I may want to do with the three of them. Which ties into...
Project 2: The Old Guard (Expanded)
This was the project I originally had in mind when I started scrounging around for these files. I have an unreasonably huge soft spot in my heart for the ‘curious couple and their unruly son’, but also, just the young gang in general. Hosea back when he’d steal anything not nailed down? Dutch, young and idealistic and years before his downfall? Arthur, young and broody but not yet hardened? Little John, still feral and a menace? Badass, gorgeous young Grimshaw? Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes, please. Not to mention Bessie and Annabelle, who must have mattered so much to these characters, but who we hear and see so little about. I want to be able to do fanart renders with them, but that’s going to take a hell of a lot of work.
Goal 1: Nail Down the Timeline - I’ve started working on this, but there’s a lot I still need to do in terms of skimming audio files and digging deep in the lore. I want to get a general idea of when it seems folks joined the gang, that way I can get an idea of which models I even need to work with. Heavy focus on figuring out:
When Tilly joined the gang, as I lean toward her being around quite early, but would like to review the audio. I know there are some numbers dropped in a few missions, with regards to when she joined the Foreman Brothers and when she left them to join the Van der Linde Gang, and I want to get this as accurate as possible.
When Hosea went off with Bessie, and when she passed. We have some context clues, I just need to nail down the math and then feel out the dramatic timing for the rest.
What the deal was with Annabelle. Maybe I just have a passion for the ladies name-dropped once in the game, but good god do I love Annabelle despite knowing absolutely nothing about her. She should be a non-character, but this is a passion project, so there’s no way I’ll be ignoring her.
What to do about Sean. He couldn’t have joined until after 1889, but depending on what year I want to deal with for renders, I may need to account for him. That wouldn’t be a hardship, as he’s one of my faves.
Goal 2: Knock Out the “Easy” Models - By which I mean Hosea, Dutch, Arthur, and Susan. This will involve some custom sculpting work, but not a whole lot, as their base models for 1899 shouldn’t actually require that much alteration. I imagine I’ll be ironing out a bunch of wrinkles, smoothing out a bunch of normal maps, and then using the clone brush and a sampling of generic NPC face textures in order to create younger-looking face textures for this lot. “Easy” is definitely a relative term here, but I’m counting my blessings in that there are, at the very least, reference images for what this lot looked like in the early days. I still have no idea if I’ll be able to accomplish this, or how hard it will be if I can.
Goal 3: John - An intermediate difficulty step, for John alone. We have no reference images of young, 12/13 year old John, but we do have Jack’s 12 yr old model, and that will serve as a decent base to work from, hopefully. I’ll have to make sure to alter his features to be more in line with John’s, and will have to work heavily with his skin/face textures from there. Clothes will be another hurdle, especially as (referenced above), we see like, next to no children in the game for me to borrow NPC clothing parts from. I’ll need to work with what we get from Jack and otherwise resize and rework adult NPC clothing.
Goal 4: Bessie (and Others) - Stepping up the workload again, though in different ways. Bessie will be a task to work out, seeing as we have a single, not particularly great reference image of her facing straight ahead. It’s not much to work with, but it’s something to work toward matching. No two ways around it, she’ll be mostly custom work and mash-ups of generic NPC materials, but it’ll be a labor of love. Also sliding Tilly and (potentially) young Sean in here, as depending on their age there will be a lot of work to do on them, possibly including custom model work, and we don’t have references for what they looked like when they were younger. I’ll make do.
Goal 5: Annabelle - The holy grail in terms of custom work, or the ultimate slog uphill, we shall see. We have no reference images of her. No traces of her exist in the files. We hardly have any clue about how she died, let alone how she lived. And yet, I love her, or at least the potential of her. Hopefully all of my work on the ‘known’ quantities of this project will give me some hope of turning out a unique and fitting model for her, but who knows.
Project 3: Audio Directory
Goal ??? - On pause for the foreseeable future, mostly as I’ll need to do some networking before I’m totally comfortable putting this out there, and also because holy hell have I set up a bunch of other work for myself. The Dream(TM) was to find a way to set up a directory for folks to more easily find audio files on their own. There’s no way to host all of the assorted cool audio from RDR2 online, but it would theoretically be possible to set up a sort of file directory online, a list of file names and descriptions, to help folks browse their audio files on their own without having to reinvent (or in this case, rediscover) the wheel personally. I’m of the opinion that pulling apart the game files should be an all-hands-on-deck sort of situation, but there are a lot of folks who have already put in this work individually, and I don’t want to step on any toes. I also don’t want to be responsible for anyone mucking around with their game files and having trouble down the road, so I’d need to sort out a clear explanation of what precautions to take, etc. It’s a lot to consider, so I’m obviously open to input.
Wrap-Up
If you’re still reading, congrats(?) and also, thank you. This is all a bunch of planning for some real pie-in-the-sky shit, but I felt that way about finding Eliza in the files about two months ago, so I have hope. If you’ve got thoughts on any step, please, hit me! I want to hear what folks want to see, though I can’t make any promises on what I’ll deliver. Got thoughts on the timeline or headcanons for the less-referenced characters? I’d love to hear. I would also love to hear from anyone with experience on projects like this; goodness knows I’m a self-taught novice.
It’s a little quiet right now, as all of the projects and project pieces are going to require a whole lot of work before anything sorta polished can be shared. I think I may want to do weekly updates for this blog, just as good practice and also, a bit, to hold myself accountable. If you’re only interested in completed works or more in-depth project info, you can probably safely block the tag ‘rdr2dd weekly update’. I may also start sharing in-progress snapshots and things like that, if folks are interested? Let me know.
Recent progress has mostly been on the ladies (Annabelle and Bessie), as that is where my attention has taken me. No faces (textures or models) yet, but I have been doing some work with various hair meshes from the game in order to put together unique hairstyles for them. I’ve also been sorting through the NPC clothing meshes to see what I can pull together for them, an outfit or two for each of them; I think I’ve got the meshes for this sorted, but I need to go through the process of sorting out the textures for them. I’ve also done a bit of work for younger!Susan, but her hairstyle is driving me absolutely up the wall. We know she used to have bangs, from that photo of her we can find in camp, but I’m having a hell of a time getting bangs to mesh well with the hair I’d chosen as a base for her.
I’ve also been mulling over the matter of backdrops. It feels like, if I’m going through all of the rest of this effort, I may as well make up some nice sets for eventual renders. Unfortunately, the process of extracting buildings isn’t quite as clear-cut as that of extracting character models, and getting the right furniture to fill those spaces is even more frustrating. I think I’m pretty set on doing this, but it’s also just one more thing on the pile. We’ll see how it shakes out.
Oh! I’ve also decided that, yes, I’ll be adding some variation in the heights of gang members. I’ll ramble on at length about height headcanons in a separate post, but for now I just want to apologize to anyone that strongly feels Dutch is a tall dude.
Summary:
Outfit meshes assembled from NPC parts for Bessie, Annabelle, and Younger!Susan. Texture work yet to be completed.
Hairstyle meshes assembled for Annabelle and Bessie, some progress made on Younger!Susan’s hair mesh.
An infinite supply of frustration unlocked in attempting to free building meshes and the furniture meshes to populate them.
Short(ish)!Dutch unlocked. rip
If y’all have questions, please always feel free to ask! I’d love to chat about the project. I’d also love to hear your headcanons, either in regards to gang member heights or Annabelle. Been thinkin’ about Annabelle a lot lately... <3
I’d like to do a bit of opinion-gathering on a dilemma I’m having regarding the heights of gang members, and how I’ll depict them in the future. Please read on and give me your thoughts!
The Context
As I sort through models and import them into Blender (the 3D modeling software I use), I’m realizing that, within a certain range, it seems like slight differences in scale are lost. I hadn’t noticed the issue at first, as I had assumed that the models of all gang members/NPCs of a given gender were the same height as a game design convenience - easier to animate, share clothing across NPCs, etc. However, as I attempted to import some of the horse models, I realized that The Count (Dutch’s tiny Arabian) and Brown Jack (Bill’s huge Ardennes) were importing as the same size. That’s a problem to troubleshoot all on its own, but it’s brought me back to a different issue:
The Problem
The gang members’ models may be of identical height in the game engine, or may initially import into Blender at an identical height, but regardless of whether the identical heights are a side effect of game design convenience or a loss of scale data during import, it does not make sense for every gang member of a given gender to be the same height. That’s just not how heights work, and while the game itself might have made differing heights hard to implement, the way that I’m handling this project will allow me to give different gang members different heights without too much trouble (I think).
Possible Solutions
I leave everyone at the height they import as. All men in the gang remain identical in height, and all women in the gang remain identical in height. Less realistic, but involves less meddling.
I take a little time and create some height variation within the gang. This would be almost exclusively headcanon-based, as I believe Javier is the only character with a height firmly stated in either RDR1 or RDR2 (he’s 5′8″).
End Thoughts
I’m leaning toward option 2, just to make things a touch more organic, but I’m curious what folks think I should do here. Let me know which option you prefer in the comments/tags, and if you want to share your height headcanons on top of that, please, go wild. :)
