Realizing that we haven't posted yet this year was kind of a shock.
Many things happened this year. I had an ankle surgery during winter, which slowed things down considerably, and we went through several family emergencies. Rough year so far.
But on the bright side, I finally finished a personal project! I 3D modeled Hyde's (of L'Arc~en~Ciel, VAMPS and The Last Rockstars fame, and he's also active solo!) custom guitar.
(no, it's not a typo. hyde writes his name lowercase for L'Arc, and uppercase for his other bands and his solo project.)
The model and textures were made by me, with Geril assisting with fixing various issues and figuring out the normal baking process, and then he did most of the setup inside Sketchfab.
I started the project pretty much as soon as this article was released about the guitar. The end of 2022 was a nightmare however, and things went downhill for a long time, and I can't even say we're fully back on track right now. But we did have enough energy to complete this, so that's something!
The model itself was done pretty quickly. There was a lot of photo hunting, and watching live performances frame by frame to see if the image was sharp enough to reference, and figuring out what custom parts were used for the guitar. I went as far as to look up the details of the stock Les Paul Junior model and use the exact fretboard radius. I went hard. I have a full gallery of totally non-psychotic guitar closeups now.
The model itself was done pretty quickly. There was a lot of photo hunting, and watching live performances frame by frame to see if the image was sharp enough to reference, and figuring out what custom parts were used for the guitar. I went as far as to look up the details of the stock Les Paul Junior model and use the exact fretboard radius. I went hard. I have a full gallery of totally non-psychotic guitar closeups now.
What took the longest was the art plate. I couldn't find a photo big enough to get a 4K texture off it, and some parts were always obscured, so I had to improvise for some of it. In the end I redrew the whole thing, even the parts I could sample off of photos, because the resolution varied so much and I couldn't bear having inconsistencies. So I sat with my tablet for hours at a time, over the course of months, and it slowly came together.
I'm happy with how it came out, and it was nice to work on something not for profit or recognition or whatever (although I did post it online, so this is a bit hypocritical), but just because I could. It's not like I'm going to use this model for anything, it's not playable, it doesn't physically exist now, it just looks pretty. And I think I really needed that after working in 3D and games for so long.
I am considering other projects like this one - I considered modeling Hyde's microphone as well, because it has a crazy art plate similar to this one, and apparently I like torturing myself with that, but time will tell if that is going to happen, I guess.
And now to figure out what to do with all this unreasonably in-depth guitar knowledge I gained.
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