Characters

A character that went through a lot of iterations and taught me some lessons about topology, anatomy, and about the importance of taking a break from your art and coming back later to get fresh eyes on it. She evolved in a lot of ways throughout the process and ended up being one of my favorites.

Another character meant to be in the same lineup as my previous "Zirconian Lancer" character. This one taught me about having objects collide with dynamic objects, as I had to make the body collide with the long flowing scarf. I learned a lot about shape keys with this avatar, as I created a pseudo-waveform effect to work as the character's visemes in VRChat. This was also a big learning experience for me weight painting and rigging closer to realistic body proportions. 

My attempt at recreating a prop from Wippy Smash, a skeleton in a suit. This taught me a lot about adapting real world objects to a model as well as dynamic objects like the tie, it was also a bit higher poly than my usual models. This one was adapted to be an avatar in VR Chat.

A fun early attempt to recreate a meme character that taught me about my style and what does and does not work within it. This was adapted as a VR chat avatar. Here's a timelapse of the creation alongside a friend who was also doing a model of his own. Here I was experimenting with a different workflow, sculpting the basic shape first then doing some re-topo. This was also one of my first attempts to animate my own character, as up to this point I had been just making characters for use in VRchat. This character was meant for actual use in a game project, so I had to go from scratch. My first idea for making animating more simple and fun was to use my VR headset and full body tracking as a cheap mocap rig. That is what I did here, and I was pretty unhappy with the results. It was definitely fun, but this is the last time I used that method. I think I could use this technique better now, I would just need to pull keyframes out of what I got from mocap and them clean it up manually, here I just used the raw mocap with basic cleanup and retargeting and I think it shows.  

A Model made during a Jam period, with the prompt being supplied after messing around with AI dungeon for a bit. Here's a timelapse. While I don't love the final product I ended up with as a result of the time restraints, there are some aspects of this character I really like and I would not be surprised if I remade this model from scratch many more times.