Wolf Woman

I've been a lil' quiet lately, which as per usual means I'm working on stuff in the background. As my supporters I figured it was about time I gave a lil' update to you all! TL:DR; Skip to the bottom for wolf lady (all the way to the bottom. There's an ugly wolf lady in the middle somewhere)

I've been tinkering around with more NPR stuff (if you're not familiar with NPR rendering, think... more stylized, basically) in blender, mostly. I have a comic rolling around in my head, and I'd kind of like to make it into a reality but a: I don't wanna draw it manually, any future comics from me are probably going to be blender'd, and b: my typical model style just doesn't work well for comics. Just kinda looks bad in comic form. So, I've been messing around with stuff to see if I can get a style that would work a little bit better for that format. I spent some time experimenting with mesh-based methods of rendering fur. My typical method uses particle based fur, and while this can look nice, it's a pain in the ass to work with in every way. It makes rendering slow, it causes lots of clipping problems, it just sucks a lot. Unfortunately, the alternative is somehow worse lol. After a lot of experimenting and struggling to find a method of making mesh-based fur in a stylized fashion that I both didn't hate and wouldn't want to off myself having to make and rig, this was the best I could come up with.

Now, this is a very early WIP experimental stage so it's never going to look amazing, but even accounting for that, it just... doesn't look great. The biggest issue is that you can't easily put fur in all the places you need it in this method without it causing more problems than it solves. The mesh-based fur "spikes" look really unappealing from off-angles so the best solution is to just leave most of the body fur-less, but then it looks weird only having fur tufts in a few areas. On top of all that, it would be an absolute nightmare to rig properly. So after much, much experimenting and time spent, I threw in the towel and started experimenting with my usual fur methods. I'll spare the details for they are many and boring, but after much experimenting with shader stuff, rigging stuff, and even throwing in some compositor magic, I was able to come up with this:

And if I may say so: I think I'm kinda cookin' with this. Most of the style isn't miles different from my usual work, but it's cleaned up just enough to I think work decently in a comic format, and the face is where the real magic happened. I found some sneaky ways to add linework on top of the fur in-model so I don't have to rely on adding it in manually or using unreliable post processing methods, they're literally a rigged part of the model so I can animate them just like any other part. And it adds SO much expressiveness to the facial expressions. I used a similar trick for the eyebrows to keep them nice and sharp, and paired with some other rigging shenanigans to give me more control over the face shape... suffice it to say, I think I'm on to something here that could actually work in comic form. Also, hot wolf lady! Always fun. There's still much, much more to do, both on this model and on the other models I'd need to make the comic in my head... this is a marathon project and there's still no guarantee it'll make to completion. But I'm very excited about this initial experiment! And, worse case scenario, I have a model I can use as an updated version of Aurora. I've never been quite satisfied with her model, and with a bit of repainting this should make a very nice improvement for her. Lucky Jessie's getting an upgrade, lol. Anyway, that's what I've been up to. Do lemme know your thoughts!