Avatar Creation for Social VR, Part 3: Character Modeling
Note: This series is an ongoing work in progress, and the video tutorials in particular will be updated and published publicly after I have finished recording the entire series. For now, the visibility for the videos has been set to shareable link only – if you have feedback on their clarity, pacing, or even whether or not the jokes land, I would welcome it in the comments here or on Youtube.
- Part 1: Introduction
- Part 2: The Blender Interface and Project Setup
- Part 3: Character Modeling – You Are Here
Welcome back! It’s now time to sit down and get your hands dirty, we’re going to spend a lot of time pushing verts and pulling faces. In this section we will run through character modeling, where we start from a cube, and finish with a character mesh.
The previous entry in this series focused entirely on the technical details of how to use Blender for polygon modeling, whereas now, we get into the workflow and thought processes involved in character modeling.Unlike the other parts of this series, poly modeling really makes the most sense when demonstrated, so I encourage you to watch the video first, even if you intend to work from this written walkthrough.
We’ve got our reference planes and the mirrored cube we set up last time ready to go. The process of modeling this avatar took about eight hours, so, again – be patient with yourself, take your time, and try to have fun.
Continue reading “Avatar Creation for Social VR, Part 3: Character Modeling”
Avatar Creation for Social VR, Part 2: The Blender Interface and Project Setup
Note: This series is an ongoing work in progress, and the video tutorials in particular will be updated and published publicly after I have finished recording the entire series. For now, the visibility for the videos has been set to shareable link only – if you have feedback on their clarity, pacing, or even whether or not the jokes land, I would welcome it in the comments here or on Youtube.
- Part 1: Introduction
- Part 2: The Blender Interface and Project Setup – You Are Here
- Part 3: Character Modeling
So! Welcome back! This is part two of the series, which introduces the Blender interface, setting up your project with reference image planes and your starting cube, and introduces the tools you’ll be using for mesh editing.
We’re going to create this avatar by manipulating edges, faces, and vertices individually, by cutting, tweaking, and extruding until we have a completed model – a process sometimes called poly modeling, or box modeling.
Later, I’ll be producing another series after this one that gets into the sculpting workflow, but if you’ve never modeled anything before, it’s probably best to start with an understanding of box modeling. It’s a process that you can do entirely with a mouse instead of a stylus, it will get you acquainted with the blender interface, and doing everything edge by edge, vertex by vertex, will help you gain an appreciation for your polygon economy, which is vital to have, when creating avatars with a decent performance rating.
Continue reading “Avatar Creation for Social VR, Part 2: The Blender Interface and Project Setup”
Watercolor Assets
So, lately I’ve been getting really into VRChat as a creative platform, because of how quickly and (relatively) easy it is to get worlds and models into a game space that is shared by and used by a lot of other people. I used to fool with Unity a lot, but making game prototypes didn’t quite have the same immediate feedback dopamine loop that furry art does (and, it turns out, that my pre-diagnosis ADHD brain needs), but VRChat’s creator tools do a great job of closing that gap: you can build a level, get it into labs, and invite friends to try it out with the same speed and ease of posting an image to an online gallery.
While I’m working on my first world, though, I wanted to dust off some of my older projects to show what I’ve already done with Unity.
I used to do a lot of watercolor painting and worked out a technique where I’d do the preliminary sketch digitally, usually in Clip Studio Paint, and then print it in pale cyan directly onto watercolor paper, then ink over the pale blue with a waterproof india ink. Then I’d stretch the paper as normal for watercolor: soak the paper til it’s saturated, then staple it to a piece of MDF to let it dry. This prevents the paper from warping too much when you get it wet, making the watercolor easier to control.
Once that was done, I’d finish the piece in watercolor and send it off to the client. Most of the watercolor work on this site was done this way. I have a pretty nice fine art scanner that does a decent job of capturing color fidelity.
I used this technique to do a webcomic for several years, and when I started playing with Unity, I got it into my head to try to paint textures for 3d objects in watercolor using the same method: printing the unwrapped UV layouts of objects onto watercolor paper, painting them by hand, and then scanning them back in, compositing the scans into a texture map and applying them to the models. I also painted several quick tufts of grass to apply to grass cards, modeled after the fact.
So far so good! Then I got them into Unity:
This was about as far as I got before I needed to put the project aside for paying work, but I’m looking forward to building out this idea further in a VRChat world as soon as I clear my plate of my current work. The idea of having friends walk around in a watercolor illustration is very exciting to me.