Alternate post title: Don’t You Just Love it When One Mistake Made Weeks Ago Ends Up Invalidating the Weeks of Work That Follow?
Okay, maybe that wouldn’t be much of an alternate title. But damned if it doesn’t accurately represent my situation -- and yet despite that, I’m actually not that mad about it.
Just…residually mad, I’d say.
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while…why?
Okay, let me start again. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you may remember that, years ago, I was spurred on by a random EventHubs post to take up 3D modeling. For fear of causing any misunderstandings upfront, I should explain that that doesn’t involve me doing JoJo poses with a green screen putting a Mario 64 level behind me. Basically, it means using programs to take something as simple as a cube and tweaking it until it becomes whatever you can imagine. And whatever your computer can handle in terms of processing power.
For my purposes? I don’t need the top-of-the-line stuff, program-wise or hardware-wise, in order to succeed [citation needed]. As I said years ago, there’s a free/open-source program called Blender that lets you get in deep with creating all sorts of things, from models to animations. (and video editing apparently, though I haven’t dabbled in that.) To be more precise? My plan at this very moment -- and maybe a little past it -- is to take the characters in my head, notes, files, and manuscripts, and render them in the virtual space.
It almost feels unnecessary to explain here, but for posterity I’ll go ahead and do it. I’ve always had a soft spot for character creation in games, because at the time (and throughout the years) they gave me the chance to build my heroes and heroines and take them for a spin. Some renderings were better than others, obviously; there’s at least one wrestling game that served me remarkably well. That passion hasn’t died down, as you can guess. I’ve played a decent number of games in the past year or two just for the sake of building my -- for lack of a better term -- OCs, and I’m following some other games in development in the hopes that I’ll be worthy of taking their creators for a spin soon.
You can already guess the issue here. Everything up to this point has been a close approximation -- almost there, but not quite perfect. Not quite matching my vision. It’s a problem that’s exacerbated depending on the game; the hair isn’t right, or the moveset doesn’t accommodate that certain style, or the voice is off, or whatever. As someone who’s needlessly obsessive and pointlessly meticulous about his OCs, it means that even a famed character creator like Black Desert Online is…well…
I haven’t written off everything else -- still waiting breathlessly for the City of Titans character creator beta/demo -- but right now I’ve decided to pull a Thanos and do it myself. So I dusted off my edition of Blender, and for weeks now I’ve been fumbling with it to not only render my characters, but to gain enough competency to do it without needing guides and videos as training wheels. It’ll still be a while before I have a concrete grasp on everything -- least of all because I forgot almost everything I learned back when I first downloaded Blender -- but progress has certainly been made. In a sense.
Here’s the thing: art in any form, in any medium, for any audience, is difficult. It takes a big investment of time (and money if you’re in the public space), to say nothing of the skill involved and the stress it can impart on the creators. Even though I’m dabbling with 3D stuff, there should be no debate on whether or not I’m a writer first and foremost. I am. It’s just that A) I’ve reached a point with those projects, I.e. the submission and waiting process, where I can work on other stuff, and B) I need more tools in my toolbox besides “makes the big word counts for the big books”.
This is the inherent limit of literature. That’s not to say it’s weaker or obsolete; it just carries an understood investment of time and energy. I could describe the most harrowing, nightmarish scene for you (and I have, IMO, in one of my manuscripts), but it would still take at least a minute or two, at a minimum, to process what took me many times more, well, time to produce. Are people willing to go that far for a no-name, unpublished doof from some random corner of the internet? It’s possible, sure. But in stark contrast? It’d take a few minutes for a reader to process a written scene. It’d take seconds to process the same scene plastered on a screen in visual form.
You know where I’m going with this, right? Yeah. The plan for now is 1) get better at 3D modeling, 2) render as many characters as I can, and 3) use them to promote my wares/get attention in a quick and efficient way. There are also a couple of bonuses for me and others. For me? My reasoning is that, if I can make a good character model once, then I don’t have to blow hours and days on making art that’ll either be subpar or otherwise janky in terms of proportions, perspective, or consistency. For others? There’s no time or energy investment to look at a picture. Or art. Or even an animation.
I, uh, haven’t gotten that far yet. But it could happen for real this time.
To be clear, though, there’s some extra prep work involved on my end before the character modeling can begin. I need to put together a guide, I.e. -- at a bare minimum -- the character in question from a front-facing perspective, and from a side profile. The former I can handle; the latter, not so much. But because I’m the way that I am, I prefer to draw the head from those two perspectives separate from the rest of the body, just to make sure I get all the details right. So basically, that’s 4 pieces of hand-drawn art that come together into 2 pieces via image editor software. Complete with all the proper colors, shading, and proportions.
Once I have those 2 finished art pieces, I can slide them into Blender and have them appear at the proper camera angles with numpad inputs. From there? I’m sure there are other methods, but the way I’ve been doing it is to start with a teeny-tiny square placed under the nose, then work outward from there. Split it in half, then delete a side so you can add a mirror modifier that’ll recreate everything you do for symmetry. Extrude from the edges to create edge loops that match your art. Pull points to create depth. And so on and so forth until you make something liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiike…this:
Once you grasp the basics, the rest becomes simpler. That’s especially got to be the case if you use a simpler model. But my reasoning (yeah, let’s call it that) is that if I can successfully make a more complex model, then I’ll be able to blast through a simpler one at a breakneck pace. (I’ve got an avatar redesign that I should have rendered years ago.) By the same token, I want my characters finished three weeks ago. The sooner I can realize their ideal forms, the better off we’ll all be.
Speaking of ideal forms? Number one on the docket is the character I’ve envisioned and teased for years on end -- not the one from my manuscripts, but certainly someone I’m itching to push in the written world. She’s the “kaiju-sized single mom” that’s taken up a huge chunk of my mind over the past few months, partly out of spite to the rest of the world (seriously, how has seemingly no one put out a decent deconstruction of a 50-foot woman?). Preliminary posts in forums and other online venues have led me to believe I’m on the right track, but I imagine nothing will garner more attention than what scientists would describe as “giant anime tiddies”. Like so:
It’s not as if working with Blender is hard. You just have to know how to do what you want to do, and have a plan for it. This is the snag I ran into recently, as it so happens. I didn’t learn this until it was too late, but you have to be mindful of your polygon counts before you make your file size/rendering/general processes too cumbersome and unwieldy.
To be fair I was in the clear for a good while; the problem is that I had to convert the hair and some threads from curves into meshes compatible with the rest of the model…which inadvertently added what looked like hundreds of polygons to the model. So when it came time to join all the individual pieces into one single unit and work from there? Blender, and my computer at large, would flat out crash. So despite all the work I put in, and despite the fact that I was minutes away from starting the coloring phase, I ended up having to abandon that file and salvaging what I could from earlier copies. Ergo the head from earlier (which to be fair I ripped out long beforehand).
To summarize: you know Little Mac’s wireframe costume from Smash Bros.?
Imagine that, only with thousands more tiny squares. Which, to be fair, was partly my fault because I overdid it with one of my modifiers and chained a boulder to my model-in-progress.
You know what, though? It’s fine. I mean sure, I’m annoyed by the fact that I’ve effectively forced myself to restart -- and from scratch, no less, given that I went back and redid the guiding art. On the other hand, I have a better grasp of the program, which was goal number one with a bullet. Better to learn what not to do ASAP than find out the hard way when it really counts.
Beyond that, it feels like this 3D modeling adventure is a puzzle I’m solving piece by piece. For days now I’ve found myself pulling a Midoriya and muttering to myself (internally, thank God) about what and how I need to proceed, Right now? I revamped the character’s design in general to simplify the model/mesh, including a completely different hairstyle. Speaking of, I’ll need to use a different methodology entirely to make it -- one I’ve already envisioned -- because otherwise I’ll end up in the exact same position as before. (The last hair model ended up being a fusion of 40 different curves, after all, which is probably an issue.) Toning down the subdivision modifier is also important, and once I model the clothes I’ll have to make sure they aren’t double-sided like last time. It’s a time-saving measure in the long run.
I’m actually pretty excited about the prospect. Certainly, the core goal is to get the written stuff out there (if I have my way tomorrow, I’ll be able to implement some big edits). But as a longtime gamer, it’s hard for me to shrug off the visual world. The art and models for stuff like ARMS, Overwatch, and Smash have all shown just what you can do with perseverance and creativity, and I want a piece of that. However small the piece.
And who knows? If this really becomes a skill I can rely on instead of dabble with, then it could help me in ways the me from five, three, or even one year ago might never have imagined. Making my own art; making my own animations; hey, maybe this could help me make my own video game some day. I seriously doubt that last one, though I suspect that getting a handle on 3D work would help me revive a certain heart-filled project. But that’s far in the future. Right now, I want to work. And I will.
See you guys next time. Try not to fry your computers with z-axis shenanigans.
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