Michiru Kagemori Week 9 (Patreon)

Early update this week, I powered through the rough part.

Image 1: I ended up manually retopping her hair from scratch rather than trying to adapt the parts I had before. It can be difficult to do this with a very irregular shape like hair, but using triangles can help. The old advice about never using tris in your mesh is not really true, at least for games. The mesh triangulates in the end anyway in games so you can use tris to terminate difficult areas and keep the polycount under control. Just keep them out of areas that deform. Rather than using an actual smooth subdivision I will use smooth edges; the last image shows this; edges mostly show in the contours when this is on.

Image 2: I just did some misc fixes; wielded the pockets into the jacket and some of the shoe parts together (the tongue and laces are still separate). I forgot to add a strap (like imagine a velcro or button strap) on the shorts for her tail: I do this with anthro characters because just having a hole for the tail in pants looks awkward. I also have to name every part of the model and add _high and _low suffixes. When you bake normal maps any parts that are close together or touching will get a splotchy effect where the normals bleed over multiple surfaces. But substance painter has a "by name" option that prevents the bake from going across objects with different names.  

Image 3: UV layout. I just use the basic unfold and cut seams in similar places in most models. I separated her into 3 UV sheets, one of the the body, one for the clothes, and one for the hair.

Image 4: For textures I use substance painter. I just bake everything; you can see the normal map which basically fakes the high poly on the low poly. It only affects how light affects the low; it doesn't change the actual surface or contours at all. I put in flat colors, which is is pretty self explanatory; its like flatting a drawing but you can fill polygons and UV shells. Some things have to be manually painted. I forgot her hands and feet, will have to make a mental note to do those. I use a set of shading materials that just add some AO, baked lighting, and edge highlights. I also added some materials to her clothes. I'd like to try some things I haven't done before on this character, mainly a flow map for her hair and gradient maps.

Michiru is pretty basic; I haven't found much art where her eyes or other forms are heavily rendered and the ones that do give her more detailed hair kind of look generic; like it spoils the iconic look of the design in the show. If a character is simple I like to stick with that and maybe just add some tiny extra flourishes rather than making everything super detailed. So I don't think I will go much further with the textures than this.