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A new, better manifestation of myself
In 2024 I learned blender so that I could build an avatar on the Showpony base. The project taught me a lot, so much so that I'm no longer happy with the quality of that work and decided to start over from scratch. This is the new one.
[Click for high-res]
These photos have a number of bugs that were fixed the day after we took them. Mostly clipping caused by weight painting, but also some odd transparent pixels on the face where two UV islands meet. I could've fixed them first, but I was getting impatient to call it done.
Behind the scenes
I found the best way to build clothes, most of the time, is to try and follow the topology of the model you're dressing. That way you can skip a lot of work on weight painting.
This doesn't work when part of the clothes aren't shaped like the underlying person though. Boxy jacket shoulders are challenging because skeletal animation is really meant to approximate flesh over bone (hence the name!) not a peice of very differently shaped cloth sitting loosely on top of that flesh, getting pushed about by it.
There's a few different ways to handle it. Something like the Yakuza series gives the clothes an endoskeleton of bones, animated to move the cloth in the right way. This is a pro grade technique and I'm just not on that level!
What I could do however is build my model in an A-Pose, which meant the resting state is half way through the range of motion at the arm/shoulder joint, keeping distortion to a minimum. The downside was that I had to build the shoulder crumpled up realistically, so that it'd streighen out when resting normally in game. It was hard to get my head around, like building a warped waxwork so that a funhouse mirror would make it look normal.
The topology looks stupid, but it's not stupid if it works!
Wherever possible I moved details out of 3D and into the materials to keep the polycount down. Top controls reflectivity, then comes normals (depth and shading), lastly the texture details. This was actually all done by building a very high detail 3D model and then baking it down into the materials of a simplified version.
So many bones! Enough to brush up against VRChat's limits, actually. This is mostly to get the hair and tail to flop about properly. But there are some hidden secrets: the upper arm and forearm bones are duplicated but not permitted to twist, to simulate loose sleeves and prevent bad shoulder crumples. There's also a small bone sticking out of each elbow, to give them a realistic shape when the joint moves. The mesh itself isn't ideal for this, though. Something to work on in future.
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