📋Creation Notes

Info

This section has random notes about the creation process for the avatar and what I learned while making it.

I often decide to make bases on a whim. I was initially trying to remake the sharko but wasn't happy with the direction. I did a few random practice sculpts and ended up sculpting the gouga head, and with a few grease pencil strokes, I thought I had something interesting, and decided to stick with it.

When I first started working on this model, I planned to make it entirely within Blender as a bit of a challenge. I sculpted it entirely within Blender, and tried to use Ucupaint to make the textures.

Unfortunately, at the time of writing this, Blender's texture brush does not behave like one would expect. It is entirely based on the viewpoint, as opposed to Substance Painter, which has a 3D brush that follows the shape of the mesh when drawing a stroke on the surface. This is currently being worked on and will be added in the future in Blender.

After the Protonoid and the casual clothing pack I made, I was pretty burnt out. My projects were getting very complicated with all these features and transition animations and alternate clothes and extra blendshapes, and I wanted to keep the Gouganoid as simple as I could to prevent burnout, without compromising in quality.

I also wanted to experiment with a tool I had bought but never got around to learn: Curve Suite by Attifyon. This tool lets you "paint" fur on a model, which adds curves to the mesh, and these curves get converted to mesh themselves. It allows for a lot of control using vertex groups.

It was a bit challenging to get the correct density in the right parts, and still required manual placement after the fact, but I am pretty happy with the result on the Gouganoid. I was able to get a convincing fur on the back that didn't eat all the polygon budget, and I was able to recreate the iridescent effect more accurately than before. I also used Rinvo's Blendshape Transfer to transfer the body blendshapes from the body to the fur.

This project is also where I tried to tackle my gripes with shading and lighting layers mentioned in #New Shading and Lighting Setup. I was already doing something similar on my own personal retextures, but they were all made manually. During the making of the Gouganoid, I tried to automate the process as much as I could, so that few people would need to mess with things to get colored shading.