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Adventures in CG
"Stormtroper wrote:It seems I started something.
And so I respond in turn!
I've been working in vRoid Studio for about a day and a half now. I've discovered a lot of things, and there's quite a bit more I'll discover going forward.
I've been having a lot of fun with it, and I've started working on a pet project of mine that I explained earlier in Updates; concept art for a rhythm game based on the Italian Disney Channel series Penny on M.A.R.S..
That project now has a name, which is Penny on M.A.R.S.: Infinite Live!! (obviously two exclamation points).
So after all of this work, I've come up with a piece of concept art;
These are the three characters of Penny on M.A.R.S., as transformed into anime characters, wearing what I'd call "School Uniform" performance outfits.
The concept behind these outfits is the "White"+"M.A.R.S. Inspired Pattern". The M.A.R.S. colors are Blue, Red, and Yellow, but I went with a pattern that had shades of the first two because
So I've created three characters so far for this project; Penny, Camilla, and Sebastian. Before I started creating my characters, I assumed I'd create all 14 or so major characters, but after putting into consideration the work I had to put in I'll probably limit myself to Sasha, Lucy, Tom, Rob, and Martha. I might do Vicky if I can figure out how to face-paint a half-mask on without my character looking insane.
Penny and Camilla are wearing the same base dress, which I think I will be using for most of my future outfits. Penny's skirt, Camilla's top and parts of Sebastian's jacket (back, lower sleeves) were made by slapping a PNG onto the outfit pattern, whereas Sebastian's pants and the upper parts of his sleeves were made by turning that PNG into a GIMP pattern and painting it on via Fill Pattern.
That's the gist of it, so expect more in-depth looks at each character after this.
Comments
Nah, if timing is everything, this was probably pretty good timing.
Probably not, actually?
Eyup. This is probably why I'll keep using secondary programs like GIMP when I want to do any serious texture editing.
Yeah I'm still confused about this, with the BOOTH clothes (which I've noticed are all PNGs) do I just actually import the look over an existing piece as a texture? I don't think that should be possible.
I really want to figure out how to use the hoodie well but I haven't really tried yet. So far I've just messed with the labcoat, the one-piece dress and the skins.
Similarly, textured shoes are a nightmare. GIMP does not like pre-existing complex patterns like leather.
Yeah, I ended up just exporting the skin pattern to GIMP. Despite vRoid's editor being ver helpful when it comes to previewing your base in terms of erasing bits from the base outfits, it's kind of unwieldy otherwise for trying to do anything else, even just painting outfits on.
Speaking of the skin, boys don't have torsos by default, which made me assume that for some reason they had white belly-shirts on (they have the slight patch just between the torso and the waist, presumably for reasons unknown).
It turns out creating skin-tight pieces using programs outside of vRoid is extremely easy if you can at least remember to also color the patch between the torso and waist (I forgot at least twice).
It's how Sebastian went from "labcoat with pattern on front" to "shirt and jacket".
Speaking of, I'm having some issues with transparency. I'm using GIMP's "Color to Alpha" thing to turn greenscreen (specifically HTML 28FF00) into transparency, since vRoid doesn't have transparent backgrounds built in, so Sebastian's grey top turned purple, and I can tell that the character's skin is also somewhat transparent.
Another fun thing; I'm apprehensive about "bust size" and "waist" editors because like, I know what they're meant for, but they're actually really useful to me because Olivia-Mai Barrett (who plays Penny) and Shannon Gaskin (who plays Camilla) have very different body types (and heights) and so it was good to be able to recreate those well.
Other fun things include me realizing like, pretty early on that I'd made Camilla's skirt very short, but then not fixing it, which meant her skirt was constantly flipping up whenever I placed her legs wrong when I was posing her.
Her hair also gave me a seriously hard time. The first time around I didn't do a bottom layer and tried to do everything in the top layer. You can't edit the base area if you draw in the bottom layer, like with Penny's bob, but if you don't do any bottom layering you get a lot of bald patches and floating hair bits, and it overall just doesn't look right.
I did find out with Sebastian that you can mess with the bottom layer bones after you create them, but I am still not sure how I did that.
I'm very very wary of creating Lucy's high-pony, but I'll try my best!
I wonder if I'll do more stuff now that I can use it as an excuse to post on IJBM. They also have to be of the correct size but yeah, apparently that's how I've seen them used. I didn't expect that.
gck outed as fan of moe kawaii uguu~
That's the evils of peer pressure for you, man.
...yeah, I probably won't find much of my time wasted on it compared to all the other things I tend to waste my time on, but you guys make it sound interesting enough to try one day or another.
- Long Coat (High Neck)
- Uniform Vest (Long Sleeve)
- Onepiece
(Put them above a layer of whatever you want to imprint that on and set said layer's blend mode from Normal to Multiply. You can control the effect by varying its opacity. You may also want to colour the mask first. Some of the default clothes share texture mapping so they may be useful not just on Long Coat, Onepiece, etc.)I should set up Google Drive or something to better share this stuff. ArtStation maybe?
Besides that, I took a look at CC0 Textures in a long while (ever?) and I see it's has a large selection of textures, plus a couple substances.
I'll probably end up using this or some other post as a link repository, but for the time being I'm posting that so I don't forget.
With all those hair decorations? Man, good luck.
Sebastian is supposed to have a hat but there's no way I'm going to mess with that stuff yet.
Ah, thanks a lot! Now I'll be free from "everything is a perfect conical shape"-ism.
So when you make a texture and it turns out you accidentally included an jutting asymmetrical fabric piece in a jacket...
So, it turns out I have been wasting a whole bunch of time exporting the patterns and slapping PNGs on them. I can literally just import the PNG instead! That is, if I've made no modifications to the outfit, and those can be done after I put the texture in anyways!
Before and after on the pants.
I then realized I'd used the jacket texture on the pants so I had to at least darken them a bit. I probably also need to figure something out for the belt, and this obviously won't work for turning the one-piece into a two-piece like I did for Penny's M.A.R.S. outfit or the jacket/skirt below.
Surprisingly enough I think shoes are slightly more complicated because of soles and so I'll need to keep exporting those.
That way weird creases where I can't fit a square stop happening.
I guess this means I'll be remaking the M.A.R.S. School Performance outfits at least.
But first; I've been working on these outfits vaguely erratically but they finally happened!
Penny and Sebastian performing So Sure.
I know I took a lot of liberties with Penny's outfit but a) I couldn't remember what the original outfit looked like and b) I really like this jacket print.
Penny's look was done before I discovered all these fancy new tricks 10 minutes ago so I'll probably also redo it soon.
Also her gloves were an accident from when I was making her T-shirt, but they look decent-ish for now.
I think I accidentally made it look like he's trying to invite her to a host club and she's not pleased with this prospect. It turns out it's better to mess with the mouth and then use "Smile" rather than just maxing out "Joy".
I accidentally made the text on her shirt too big because the scale difference between the models and the textures is something I'm not used to yet.
I started messing around with concepts for looks for Camilla and Penny performing Rain and Shine.
These are just recolors of the M.A.R.S. base, but I think they look different enough. I'll really need to smooth out Camilla's neckline and sleeves though... (or I'll keep hiding it with hair).
Iunno, imgur works fine for now but I guess when the thread starts to fill up we'll need a space to better collect things.
tomorrowtoday when it's not just past midnight.On non-VRoid stuff, I also began working on a Substance** live-link plugin (for now I'm just looking through source code). I'm not sure what for, maybe Godot or Blender (for which one already exists), I'm just kind of curious how those linking things work.
* The textures that make it look like stuff isn't actually flat.
** Substance Designer/Painter, the industry-standard software to work with procedural materials/textures.
First of all, run-of-the-mill Paint but with a touchscreen is like Hyperdrive. Things get done much faster. I've also never really tried out Paint 3D before, and it's not really all that great versus normal paint (especially with the Select options basically being traded in for Cropping nonsense) but if they would just rejigger the Paint 3D "Fill" feature with the sensitivity into normal Paint, Paint from the 90s would be literally perfect.
At some point I also figured out how to do normal body painting in vRoid, but I'm not sure I remember how exactly. I pulled it off twice though so really I should remember.
vRoid with a touchscreen is brilliant, especially when it comes to hair and most especially editing outfits. I wish I could work out the kinks in the ridges, and I certainly wish I could figure out how shoulders on garments could get smaller so it'd all look sleeker, but I think I've progressed quite a bit.
However, the tradeoff was that this was a laptop with an amorphous touchpad/left/rightclick button thing, and that was so extremely unwieldy that any finer touches were rendered impossible.
To some extent, I prefer my permanent set up, even without the touchscreen... to some extent...
really, honest
So I worked on a character who has been missing, and is a favorite of mine; Sasha!
His M.A.R.S. School Uniform look came out better and worse than expected. I wanted to edit the undershirt so the torso was white with the M.A.R.S. Logo, but I didn't have my usual suite of programs to help out so I settled. I also probably should have cut his pants better.
I don't know why characters seem to have PermaSocks in certain looks, but I can't paint skin at all so I hope I can figure out how to stop that. Here, I had to do a hasty touch up to make his socks look athletic so they didn't clash with his tights. I should have probably just doubled down on the tights and made them mesh with the socks, but those are the great thoughts you have in hindsight.
Sasha is supposed to have a topknot, but so far I haven't really gotten it to look just right. I'll try again tomorrow.
Now, for the most important thing about Sasha; his duet with Penny from Season 2, Timeless.
I actually had to go back and watch the music video so I didn't screw the looks up too much.
I thought Penny's choker was super cute but I am now rethinking it. Painting on accessories does not work as well as painting on shirts.
The looks from the music video;
I know, I know, Penny has pants here, but I really liked how this looked as a skirt and I didn't have a decent enough pattern for the pants and wasn't willing to risk a paintjob.
probably depends on what you do though i happen to frequently use MS Paint to save screenshots lol
also for cropping avatars which requires exact dimensions which are easier done with the mouse, though i started doing that more in GIMP
I tried putting a standard PBR on their clothes, but it's not going to look okay without going through the effort of making folds (actual folds or maybe more maps). Turns out that's where I got them.
Making patterns from seamless bits takes much less time (both Penny and Sasha's shirts started as one square that became 9 in less than 20 seconds, and you just in general save time on moving the mouse around (though you do lose a lot of precision).
So I thought I'd take a shot at making my own interpretation of... something resembling it in CG!
So I present to you
AriLuciana Giga and LadyGagaStar!When I was collecting my textures and stuff, I thought I'd be able to get a more solid interpretation of the looks, but by the time I got around to making Lady Star's first look I was completely just doing my own thing.
I did Luciana Giga's two looks first, and I had to save them under different avatar profiles because it's actually really annoying trying to re-texture everything. Another thing is that for some reason, if you change an outfit it also changes the skin texture back to default, which means you lose basically everything you'd done in terms of skin painting.
In terms of hair, I already had the idea of doing white/pink for Lady Star rather than trying to match anything from the music video, and again I am really not trying for pigtails of any sort yet so that's why Luciana is lacking a high-pony.
As for the color, I don't know if you can actually get the pastel purple to look right in vRoid, but I did try quite a bit.
After looking at it a few more times I realized that Lady Star's primary outfit was probably more inspired by all the 90s Europop music videos I've watched lately than anything from the Rain on Me music video.
Secondary outfits.
I intended for the pattern on Luciana's top to continue into a dress, but it looked terrible on the skirt, so I settled for a mini-train instead. I didn't realize I'd used the feather pattern on both skirts, but it's not really noticeable unless you look really hard.
I've always wanted to try and do floating cuffs with vRoid, so I'm glad I got the chance.
I've also finally figured out how to do transparency in GIMP without overdoing it! Just set the tolerance to a low enough level and things come out fine.
More pictures;
For some reason there's an unusual amount of anime-ish background tutorials on YouTube lately, it's something I've taking interest
recentlythis year, I guess I'll follow some, though at some point I should get back to doing project-projects.Learn how to properly export vRoids into PMXEditor
It seems you have to do the hair bones in vRoid first, or things will come out weird.
It seems you have to have your vRoid at a good height, or things will come out weird.
It seems you have to get rid of basically all the body bones in PMXE and then redo them, or things will come out weird.
It seems you have to bone any flowy skirts and other pieces of clothing, or things will come out weird.
It seems that sometimes, things will just come out weird for no reason. Those times, you just have to reboot PMXE or re-export your vRoid.
Learn how to use MMD
It occurs to me I've never genuinely thought about this, but now that I've watched half a video about it, I'm an expert. You can use other people's dances and backgrounds, which brings me to;
Learn how to make my own MMD dances
This is probably really time-consuming and tedious, but wouldn't it be cool if Lady Star and Luciana Gigante could star in their own version of Rain on Me? I've imagined like, seven versions of this so far, all of which featured complex backgrounds. Which brings me to;
Learn how o use MMD backgrounds, probably via Blender
@Stormtroper: Blender isn't hard, right? I mean, I tried it years ago as a child. I had a friend who was vaguely better at it than me. Granted, he could only really create squares and polygons, but it was more than I could do at the time.
I want to give this a shot, but it feels slightly overwhelming...
Plus, my original Penny on M.A.R.S. project seems to be going by the wayside. I was meant to recreate the School Uniform Performance looks, but right now my focus may be switching from outfit design to all of this other stuff.
First of all though I should probably get a handle on this ponytail thing...
The biggest problem when doing 3D I'd say is troubleshooting, it'll often happen that something doesn't look right and it's not obvious why, but if one can get the hang of what tends to cause issues* I think they'd have no problem getting as far as their artistic abilities allow.
By the way, what do you mean by using MMD backgrounds? You mean putting characters in them?
.* Common culprits: no lights, lights with no intensity, missing textures, textures assigned to the wrong place, hidden objects blocking the camera, objects that should interact within a layer not being on the same layer, trying to use a feature not available on the current renderer.
Yeah that's what I'm depending on.
Weird wording on my part; I meant editing them and probably (eventually?) creating them wholesale.
Around two years ago I'd have suggested a beginner to start with one of the other two, but with the changes it's gone through I think Blender is probably a good choice too, I'd go with it.
Though in the long term the choice shouldn't matter that much, experience in one software translates well into the others. Ahh, that makes sense. Yeah, Blender is definitely suitable for that.
Sounds like my best option then!
Remember Mandalas? They were so big for the longest while, especially when adult coloring books were becoming a thing.
----
I will eventually get around to animation, but I decided to finally finish my MARS School Uniforms first.
Left to right we have Lucy, Sasha, Martha, Penny, Camilla, and Sebastian.
It seems this GIMP technique I'm using is not dealing with the transparency as well as I thought... (the tiny dots everywhere).
Then this morning I remembered that Tom is a character that exists. I had already decided to leave out Sofia and Mike, since they aren't singers, but Tom is too important to leave out so I'll have to get around to him at some point.
I'm quite worried about Tom, since the main difference between him and Sasha in hair terms is that Sasha has a bun. I figured out how to make a ponytail for Lucy, but I already like how Sasha looks. I guess I'll just try to do a vaguely choppier front for Tom...
Aside from Tom, I also want to create Rob and Vicky, however I don't know what to do with their affiliation looks. My first instinct is always to create a School Uniform look, because that's how it works in Aikatsu!.
In the series, Rob
and Vicky areassociated with the orphanage Pete stays at , so maybe I could try making that work. I genuinely forgot Vicky went to M.A.R.s. well, that's one more School Uniform I guess!Oh so I sure buried the lede with this. I finally got around to making Lucy;
In terms of resemblance when it comes to the outfit (well, I thought so until I checked and found that her jacket was not leather, but some fluffy material), I think this was my best work. I also finally figured out a ponytail...
Actually, I mainly did that by hiding my mistakes behind a pseudo-bun where the ponytail connects to the head, but it looks pretty good!
By the way, I did find the male torso (and as a bonus, no socks). Unfortunately, it seems to only be available via the 'One Piece'. I just exported it for use with other looks.
I did not know the boys had such serious abdominal muscles.
I tried again getting normal/displacement maps from Vroid's models, this time I manually sculpted the folds based over the pre-existing color map. I initially intended to trace over it but I was getting better results by using it as a reference instead, as my computer can't comfortably handle modifying the mesh while it's using a textured shader and the lag was being a serious hindrance.
- Sculpted vs. flat.
- Sculpted (no color map)
- Normal map vs. no normal map
- Normal map vs. no normal map (No color map)
With those renders I see I overdid one of the folds by the wrist.I had trouble with the parts where the sculpted mesh turned out deeper than the base model, I thought better could handle these but the textures I got from that wrecked the shading. I used the option to extrude the sculpted mesh outwards (by 5cm) which I thought would mess too much but I'd say it turned out okay. Perhaps if I could work with higher resolution meshes things could turn out better.
I've only done the sleeves up to the wrists by now, I'll get to the rest of it later.
Also I can't seem to get to imgur's older user page, which is tragic because the newer one is painful to use.
Yeah I really do like how it works out. I mean, I'd like some preset options so you could have it be curly or fuzzy or whatever but the way it is now works really great for most hairstyles I could think of.
Imgur's new interface as a whole prioritizes other people's memes over whatever you're actually trying to get to and it's kind of funny that this is the interface they're trying to get people to pay for (rather than baiting Emerald with something like "you can use the
oldpremium interface!".This actually involves two different variations; the one from the M.A.R.S.ical and the one from The Talent Show, but the former involves way more characters (8?) than the latter (5).
So far I'm done with Martha, Penny and Tom, though I want to change some things on Penny and Tom so here's just Martha;
The concept is supposed to be "The Beautiful Swan", so I think I got a pretty decent fairytale look here.
I ended up going back to Penny on M.A.R.S. and taking a thousand caps to create a moodboard, when I realized my concept (the paint splashes) was nothing like what was in the show, but I think I like my concept better. I'll just try and match the outfit cuts more.
EDIT: I think one of Martha's hairs is being weird. It will be so much fun trying to figure out which one...
I finished the cloth sculpt.
Two things come to mind:
* The cloth shouldn't get darkened like that, for whatever reason Blender is not baking correctly, the resulting texture is noticeably darker than default blue.
* (Not visible) there are artifacts when rendering in Cycles (the raytracer (i.e. accurate) renderer). The cause is probably the same as above.
I want to think doing this exercises helped me learn how cloth folds should look. I don't think I'll be sculpting something like this anytime soon without a better CPU, tho.
Edit: Oh yeah, it's also missing the seams.
It turns out you can use textures on hair too! I ended up not saving this one.
Started playing around with layers. I wish I could create a bit more texture with one layer being genuinely below/under the other like with real clothes, but I think I did well enough with what was available.
@Stormtroper: I used your One Piece filter as well as two layers to make this;
I thought it was going to look really heavy (and here it does) but I didn't even need to mess with the transparency settings.
And now I've started working with PMXEditor. The tutorial I'm following features rapid mouse movements and what can only be called "menu racing" for all the important bits (which start around the 10m mark).
I've gotten through everything so far except jointing my skirt and making it work properly. I'm apparently missing the exact physics somewhere and the tutorial isn't really helping so I'm on my own. Same thing happened with my hair for a bit, where whenever I turned the physics on a few strands would plummet to the ground and spin in wild circles.
You're supposed to link the hairs to a base and then to themselves. This might actually be my current problem too, but in a slightly different way.
On the bright side, at one point I accidentally deleted her foot bones and so I had to stop watching the tutorial to find something entirely different to teach me how to create new bones in PMXE as well as how to link them properly. That'll probably end up being extremely useful later on.
Everything before that also took forever to figure out as well so I ended up taking what has turned out to be an overly long break.
Once I figure that out though I can try bringing Lady Star to life in MMD.
Gee, that tutorial looks painful to follow. Given that all VRoid's models are rigged the same way, I'd have thought there would be a one-click solution to convert it to something that works in PMX.
Coincidentially I've also been having trouble with the skinning/rigging, I've been trying to export VRoid models from Blender to other formats and often getting errors, at least in part caused by those.
I think it has something to do with how the skirt bones are linked to her spine on the Y-axis. Once I create the skirt bones, they all converge on her spine's center-point and flow into the ground like an upside down triangle.
Despite checking these physics 20 or so times, I am yet to take a cap of it.
I think I either screwed up and deleted her spine bone so I'm linking to something else (unlikely since I see it every time I bring the bones up), or I somehow accidentally did a thing that made her spine bone too long in some setting I don't know about and can't see.
I've attempted this tutorial and though I did actually manage to get the downward pointing bones in the skirt to converge around the skirt like it says, the upside-down triangle still reared it's ugly head.
I have a feeling this might also have to do with using the new (or final, since it's not being updated anymore) PMXEditor and not the one from either tutorial.
The problem might be linking the skirt to the spine at all, rather than just the bones at the top of the skirt, but the tutorial specifically said I should do that.
Maybe I should give up and make more Infinite Live!! outfits for a while, then come back to it in a few weeks.
I really don't want to start my model over but I might have to...
I haven't had the chance to try it (especially since GitHub has no easy way to download stuff from mobile), but from what I've found on the net, it looks like it may be possible to do it with Blender as an intermediary plus an addon called MMD Tools.
Also TIL MMD is free.
Thanks! I will look into this.
- MMD Tools allows you to use several functions, even if they're not as useful as PMX's Editor (I don't know if they are), having them there would greatly simplify making scripts to automate things.
- It correctly exports the armature. There's weight information visible on the model in PMX Editor (in the vertex tab) and it's not obviously wrong. However there's apparently a limit of up to 4 bones affecting each vertex, if it's not just an UI thing perhaps that'll cause trouble in some parts, like shoulders? I haven't figured out how to pose the model in PMX Editor so I haven't tried it for reals and am not sure if it really imported/exported correctly.
- There's no helping the fact that there's no rigging on the exported .pmx file, even if MMD Tools does it right (which I doubt, as these things tend to work very differently between formats), VRoid definitely does not export it, so one has to create it within other programs.
- I'm not sure how to go about the rigid bodies thing as in the video, although it looks like something that'd be easy to automate.
I'll look into it some more over the weekend.Also TIL Blender doesn't natively export PMX files, and my efforts to install an add-on tool called Meshio failed (yet somehow MMDTools works fine).