Look, a finished project!

Hi! Lussy here.
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.

Gibson Les Paul Junior - hyde (L’Arc〜en〜Ciel) by ExceptionGate on Sketchfab

(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.

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.

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.

[fanart] Frey Underground - Animated by ExceptionGate on Sketchfab

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.