This Week in the Forest! #156 (Patreon)

YO FOLKS!

This is what we were up to last week. Starting with a word from Vixel:

4/30 weekly update:

Happy new week to you! ^w^ Last week I worked on bringing in new assets to continue the main story after the forest's big storm. This week I have a ton of scripting to do to make that new content playable. Also been exploring some stuff for localization (language translation) as we're hoping to move forward with that before long!

Have a nice week! <3

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On my end, I continued to take it easy with my wrist. It is making significant process! It no longer hurts when I move it around in all sorts of directions! It still feels a little fragile under certain stress or pressure, but in general I'm happy to see progress. Still probably a good idea to be off of it for another week or two, or at least not go too hard.

During this break, I've started to organize a new discord category for our permanent and visiting critters. We need a spot to organize everyone, and archive all of the work and information on all of the critters.

It's in the very early stages so far, I've set up a few channels and a welcome message, but a lot of stuff is under construction. For now, I will try to make a bit more headway there, then start giving the permanent and visiting critter role to those it applies to. I probably will restrict access on people seeing this, since it will have a lot of spoilers. But maybe we can grant the role to those who don't mind spoilers and want to see a bit more of that process.

We are still a good while away from including the visiting and permanent critters, but it's always good to make movement on some of the first steps - like creating their sprites. Plus, that sort of thing isn't too crazy to do - so I don't need my hotkeys!

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Regarding the picture above, I thought it would be neat to kind of describe my process for breaking down a character like this.

Last post, I had a bunch of doodles of Zhen, these were studies from the film. So very very referenced. But how do we go from a study, to being able to design and make the character do what we want?

First, we need to break down the character into their basic shapes and proportions. To do so, we need to be able to see what the character looks like.

A character's clothes is very much incorporated in their base character design. Meaning the shape language of the clothes influences the feel and likeness of the character. But, for furry shenanigans, we want to know what they look like underneath as well! So I took this frame from the movie, and did a quick paint-over. That's the top left image. Here, I'm kind of just making educated guesses as to what size/shape/proportion to this character beneath the clothes.

Once I land on something that seems about right, then I can start to focus on the construction. The two light sketches in the top middle is me planning these out. Using a large brush let's me focus on the shapes and proportions, rather than getting caught up in details.

Once I am familiar with the shapes and proportions, I am able to use them to build out new poses for the character. The top right image is me putting that to the test. Some of her likeness is already getting lost, and the struggle at this stage is to remember the nuances that I learned during the studies, and not to forget her general character from the movie. So probably worth doing another round of studies, but this time more targeted, say specifically her expressions.

That's about it! Of course, each stage of this process is its own rabbit hole of things to consider. But it's up to you to decide where to go from here. Focus more on scrutiny if you need to really nail down the characters likeness, and be really on model.

In my case, my goal for Zhen was mainly for fun and to get me drawing something! With this amount of study, I'm usually able to pretty comfortably draw character like this doing whatever, and with little reference. (Not to disparage references, things will always come out better if you use references!)

Okay that's it for my Ted talk! We will see you guys soon!