#tdudewips

[toast-dude]

Working on this slowly

I've never played but how can you not love that little train. This interpretation is inspired by the likes of Ivor the Engine and Furness Railway #20.

I've been chipping away at this on and off over the last two months. No idea when I'll finish.

[toast-dude]

Scalchop Blade

I think the model captures the style of the original. The blade material was created entirely using math nodes and some custom object properties. Some compositing would probably help but I'm not at that stage yet.

[toast-dude]

Work in progress

I've been working on this model for several months and I finally got it looking almost like what I envisioned after three revisions. There's still a lot to do before I start animating it.

This is the first character I am attempting to model from scratch, and it's definitely both a learning process and slow going. Trying to create a 3D model of a "more realistic" pokemon by including elements of the real life animal as well bringing in a third influence in the form of making the facial structure resemble a specific human character. The current result I think accomplished that reasonably well insofar as the character's identity and species are identifiable.

There are a few hurdles between now and a finished model that is ready to animate.

Mouth: think up how I am going to model the gums, teeth, tongue, and mouth of the character given that the face is in the way.

Accessories: I want to give this character some specific accessories. These need to be modeled.

Hairstyle: although some interpretations of the character feature no kerchief, the authors depiction included it, so I feel it appropriate to do as well.

Rigging: making everything move in a convincing way is probably going to take a lot of work. For the character, I have to convert the existing skeleton to a rigify template, which is relatively straightforward, but there are some tricks I've seen in other models that have to be setup manually and I have to reverse engineer those. Then I have to weight paint the model, which is an artistic talent I don't have much expertise in. Once the characters body is rigged I have to figure out how to rig the hair and accessories. Since the character may equip or remove the accessories, I have to plan for that.

Facial expressions: of particular concern is making the mouth expressive enough to move in a way that resembles speaking. Sure, rigify has some options for it but in my limited experience the rigify facial options are not very streamlined.

Once all that is done, I can call the model ready for action, and then I can make the sets and props, as well as make the other characters, which hopefully will go faster.

[toast-dude]

Progress on my blender game engine project. Uploading this video to tumblr has been more frustrating than patching any bug in this project thus far. It doesn't bode well for uploading the final product, but I press on.