2016/11/28

3D Yuumei Fanart: Frey Underground!

Hey!

We've had some free time this month, and decided to mix things up a bit. This is completely unrelated to any of our previous stuff - it's a fanart of Yuumei's Underground picture.

The whole thing started when we realized that our portfolio was a little... one-sided. Not everyone likes the OLP stuff and style, but until now, that was the only thing we could showcase as a team. Separately we've worked in many different styles, but together we've mostly worked in one. So we've decided to try out different styles and subjects for practice, experimentation, and for our portfolio. This was also a challenge for us, to see how far we can get in about a week and how efficient we are. We've probably went a little overboard, but oh well.

Frey, the character is fully rigged and has a morph target set for emotions and complete lip-syncing. Basically we've created a game-ready character as fast as we could.

We've planned to include a violin playing and a random goofy animation as well, but exporting into Sketchfab-friendly FBX made our work hard. The process was very tedious and took up almost a whole additional day. (We're now convinced that Blender hates us) We can't include those animations in the same scene we've uploaded, and we thought making a new scene just for that would be overkill. Maybe we'll upload it someday, if people are interested.

We've decided on this particular piece because I [Lussy] am a long time fan of Yuumei and thought that shiny PBR lights would go well with her art style. It was refreshing to work based on someone else's "concept art". Can't wait for Fisheye Placebo to continue!

Here are some WIP pics:

Frey isn't happy with his incomplete hair
Attack of the placeholder normalmaps
Frey's violin in Sketchfab's editor
Some of Frey's test expressions and lip-sync
We love Sketchfab, and it's a shame that it isn't more popular. Whenever we show Sketchfab links or embeds to someone, we have to explain that it isn't a picture or a video, and that the camera can be moved. We always have to either explain the exact controls and settings (for example, this model always loads in SD quality and you have to manually set it to HD) in a wall of text, or leave out the instructions and hope very strongly that people will try clicking on the model. We went with the latter this time.

We hope you liked it! We were trying hard not to butcher the scene. Hope we didn't.