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Comments
This was done using the Cycles renderer, which sure took forever.
Of course after figuring out the basics I immediately used them for VRoid-adjacent purposes.
This was done using the Eevee renderer after I figured out that all the tutorials I was using about textures on objects were super-outddated. I figured it out by working really hard to scroll all the way down through my materials options. Textures are embedded there now. Hard work, I assure you.
I did not realize how pretty her dress would look with the folds embedded like that.
Once I figure out how to mess with VRoid bones inside Blender I will be unstoppable.
Well that and importing 2 or more VRoids at once. I mean, this'll probably just involve importing objects somehow...
I should probably also learn how to group objects at all (to create shadowboxes as single objects) before I attempt anything with bones.
This was done earlier than the previous image, but using Cycles. It is several times prettier as a result.
Also, turns out massive 2D PNG textures will probably just not look as pretty in Blender. Unlike typical color-based materials, they don't naturally pick up reflective light. Maybe I'll learn more about that later.
I am really surprised at how wonderfully my extremely Pre-K finger-paint skills on the make-up and irises came out.
There's also the denoiser, which will greatly reduce the amount of samples needed to achieve similar (if slightly less accurate) results. Before you set it on, save whatever you're doing, on Blender and elsewhere, graphics driver crashes aren't rare.
There's also clamping (render properties -> Light Paths -> Clamping then play with the numbers). It'll reduce/eliminate fireflies (the random white pixels when rendering), getting you acceptable results for less samples, at the cost of accuracy (it'll be darker). It's tricky to use and not as effective as other stuff, but it's useful for test renders.
Reducing render times is a craft in itself, but those things go a long way when it comes to one-click solutions.
By the way, how are you importing VRoid models? I'm asking 'cuz there's this importer which includes materials that are faithful to what you see in VRoid Studio. Oh yeah, you'll want to avoid tutorials from before version 2.80 (you can tell they're old from the lighter UI), a lot has changed with the jump to that version. You mean, moving the box also moves its contents? That's parenting; select the non-box objects, then shift+select the box (it'll be bright, almost-yellow orange, the other objects will be a darker orange), then ctrl+P -> Set Parent and you're done. Use alt+P to clear parenthood. There isn't much to it, you select the armature (the bunch of sticks within the model), go to Pose Mode (ctrl+tab, not unlike Object Mode or Edit Mode) then pose away. You'll most likely only be rotating bones and moving the whole rig by translating the root bone (it's around the hips).
That's okay when posing for stills, unfortunately for animating you'll want a rig to be able to control the model like it's from an actual human being (like the one in VRoid). The best videos on rigging I've seen is this (and followable in 2.80), so after several hour of error-prone work you can create it, or you can use the script I talked about some time ago. I'd rather not publicly link my IJBM and GitHub accounts so PM if you're interested... actually, looking at it it's not very user-friendly and there's an it causes the hands to get all deformed so I gotta fix that first. I was supposed to clean it up and make it ready for release it but I guess I never got around to it. Oh well, the offer is up anyways.
Speaking of scripting, I checked the MMD thing and it does looks doable doing something similar to export to PMX. I'm not sure I understand, but it sounds like the problem is with the materials, not the color textures, as those don't influence how light shines on them (unless we're counting things like having brightness and shadows painted on them).
I don't know about that! I mean, right now, I'm looking at what I want to do in a timespan that I've put at like... 3-6 months?
Ah, I'll look into this. I don't think I'm near good enough for things like this to matter yet.
Fun!
Initially I used VRoid to PMX, then saved Lady Star as a .blend project. I don't think there's too much that doesn't look similar aside from maybe the hair smoothing, which I think is a good thing. However, if I can manage even the slightest improvement (and also remove random file conversion steps) I'll be switching to this.
Ah, thanks! This is basically one of the most vital things I'll need to master properly.
Obviously.
Yeah I think at least for a while I want to just really acclimate myself to working with making really beautiful competent still work and modelling rooms, as well as other things of that sort.
Linku ga nai...
Yeah I'm expecting that.
Ah, I get it. Thanks for the offer, and I'll probably take you up on it in a few weeks/months.
MMD Tools?
Basically, what I did in my images there was create a plane and set it behind Lady Star. I then created a simple color material in pink, and as you can see that looks brilliant.
When I changed the material to a PNG texture (this one), not only did it come out stretched (even though materials are set to wrap), but it didn't carry the same reflective effects as the simple color. It also doesn't handle the light very well.
Most importantly, since Blender uses realistic lighting by assuming everything is dark until you tell it otherwise, I don't have the benefit of infinite daylight style lighting making the colors come off brightly.
This actually works wonders for my VRoid models, since suddenly I'm working with CG that is at least to my eye is on par with something like FFXIII when it comes to clothing (skin and such are more basic, but probably better than a bunch of commercial cartoons). That may be due to working with it in VRoid rather than Blender, I'm not sure yet.
As for the stretching, there's a built-in addon to import textures as planes, maintaining the texture's proportions. Enable it through preferences -> addons -> search, it's called "Import Images as Planes", then on the 3D view shift+a->images->Images as planes.
That works with planes, but more generally the issue with stretching is that after scaling you need to change the UV mapping to whatever it should be, you can do so on the UV Editing tab while the object is selected and in Edit Mode.
And yeah, it's doing non-photoralistic things usually take some workarounds, fortunately creating flat lightning is not difficult:
(You can make it brighter with the Strength value at the bottom.)
I know stop-motion has less of a skills investment and I didn't even consider Blender being a thing I could do but I feel like... a weird sense of something I could have done even though it's not really realistic.
But vRoid didn't even exist back then so I'd have had to make all my models from scratch, which seems unlikely.
tl;dr i dun git no work done y'all
Then I tried making my own CG models (albeit using pre-built bases) trying to fulfill what I thought was a simple concept and gained a new appreciation for the 20 or so "CG Artists" listed in the credits of every show.
I've been learning basic shapes/movement on the axis and I've just gotten to edit mode, so I don't really have a cool project to show off just yet.
However, I did go back to vRoid and export all my Lady Star and Luciana Giga models. Unfortunately I forgot that I'd scaled my first Lady Star model down for PMX to MMD purposes so stuff's gonna be weird if I can't figure out what her initial height was and re-export her so she matches Luciana.
Anyways, I created a new outfit to go with Lady Star's Elegant+Ancient+Colorful outfit, so here it is!
At first I was just stumped trying to work out how to use my overskirt fabric with anything else, but then this red glitter came along and I realized this would make a great Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz sort of inspiration.
Since I've been messing with layers a lot lately, her tights are actually a full-on PNG texture applied to a secondary layer of skin. I think that's a fun little thing to do with vRoid, since you can make people with wholly textured bodies (as long as you have a fantastic memory of the typical body make-up for when you decide to try and find it underneath the texture).
I then started messing with Pose Mode and oh my gosh Pose Mode. I mean, I think I did an okay enough job for my first time but I'm going to need to work at getting it right.
I did not know that even if you erase the lines of an outfit in vRoid, it will still export your vRoid as if she still has the whole form on.
I tried to Copy/Paste the pose to Lady Star to save time but dekinain'da.
Then I created a shadowbox with a bunch of planes, and managed to parent them to one another. Hilariously enough, I couldn't reverse the parenting, and every object I created after I parented the first two parented to the initial plane.
I've heard doing alt+[something] can reverse things like this, or maybe I should have returned to select. Eh, I'll figure it out eventually.
I also learned that planes have sides, and that means textures only appear on the face of whatever you're doing. No points for guessing which side is facing L.Star and Luciana!
And since I couldn't unparent the shadowbox, that meant I couldn't turn it right way round, so I had to settle for materials.
I am not sure what I did with my basic light, but in Shading mode I suddenly realized that it was on the wrong side of the shadowbox and that I'd hidden it somehow!
TN: "Somehow" means "oops".
Anyways, that gave me the opportunity to learn about adding lights. No tutorials required, because I mean it's obvious where lights are once you spend 1000% of your time using the add menu to shove new meshes into things.
I used a Sun light, and my gosh was I confused using it. I think part of it was that I'd moved my Camera all the way out and Camera+Shading rendering doesn't seem to work too grand if the camera is too far from what you're messing with.
Anyways, I also learned that cameras are objects so you can make them larger and such just by touching them. I also saw somewhere that you can set a camera on a rig (which like, obviously that's super necessary for animation) but I'm yet to try it out.
Eevee came out nicely;
But by George, Cycles is beautiful;
And yes, I see what's happening with L.Star's hand. I'll keep working on my Pose Mode skills.
I might also have to patch that spot on her head where her hairline is visible sometime.
By the way, in addition to the lights you see on the scene there's also world lighting, the equivalent to light coming from all directions (in Cycles) or the default lighting that all objects are lit by in addition to the scene lights (in Eevee). That is, it's the gray background. You may want to play with that too if you want to, say, make it look like they're on a stage. You may have hidden it with "h" at some point, it happens. Alt+h to unhide everything.
Darn, I might have messed around too much with the dark art of duplication!
Yeah, that sounds like something I'll need at some point.
Besides that, I was toying around with VRoid. I always have trouble making hair look nice, and it's not a tools thing. There's some principle I'm missing that makes hair look okay.
I'm done with the most obvious stuff, but it's missing several of the details on the clothes, she looks very plain without these.
It took me a while to realize that I made her look like she was balding, I did the best I could to correct that.
I intend to use a different shader for the skin (currently it's the same one VRoid uses). I'd like to use subsurface scattering, either to make it look like in every 3D movie ever or like a figurine, but last time I tried it in Eevee it was causing lots of artifacts, and using it in cycles takes forever.
Nonetheless I have the feeling it won't look good in the end.
Also, looking at references I learned that in several of the games Reimu's ribbon around her neck is not yellow.
You will not believe the amount of this I go through every time I mess with vRoid.
By the way is she vaguely flat or is that just the angle?
I'm meant to be doing a lot more work in Blender, but I'm currently Up to Something and so I wanted to do some work in vRoid for that project and that took literally two hours.
Since I'm looking to work on genuine animation with Blender at some point I've abandoned Penny on M.A.R.S. for my own original characters, so this is Hayley Tedderson. Her last name is a reference to musician Ryan Tedder of OneRepublic but like in a cool non-obvious way.
All of these outfits use textures I made myself because the whole point of her style is supposed to be like... well, it's Tommy Hilfiger minus the copyright infringement.
This is Schultz Walker, based on the many characters I've wanted to call Shultz in stories. She's famous, unlike the noob Hayley, so she's also cutthroat. However, I'm not taking credit for the thing with her eyes fluttering, that was me forgetting to turn off Auto-Blink.
I had to redo my picture of her on the right after I noticed it, and then I had to redo her first outfit anyways but I added the closed eyes on purpose.
The jacket and tights on the left I also made myself, but the rest is the typical found on the webs stuff.
One thing I didn't know about vRoid is that the skin texture color affects anything laid over it, so I was forced to do more outfits for Shultz in dark colors so the whites wouldn't come off as her skin tone. In fact, the lettering on her tights in the first image is meant to be white.
I think Shultz hair turned out pretty well, but I have to get better at painting the back of it because it's hard to do very long strands so I end up creating strands in the middle of the back.
I also realized that I did not bone any of the hair on all of my Hayley and Luciana Giga vRoid exports so I will certainly have to redo those or just figure out how to do that in Blender later. I need to make a habit of boning hair right after I make it.
Another useful thing I learned a while back is that if you pick an outfit to mess with, say "School Uniform - Skirt" and then use the outfit stuff on the right to change that to a One Piece or whatever, and then create your outfits, you can save all your outfits for one character in the same vRoid file.
However, if you use "One Piece" over and over and overwrite the textures it's Gone Forever.
I have a bad feeling I have overwritten a bunch of L.Star and Luciana Giga's outfits, which is bad because I need to mess with them (and then re-export the vRoids for each look, this is a lot of work). Luciana needs hair bones, and L.Star needs her height adjusted back to normal...
Now I move on to working with boys. I hope the outfits come out okay...
Regardless, it shouldn't be hard: export the model with correct hair bones, import it into blender, from the imported model delete everything except the armature, then on each of the original's parts (head, body, hair) go to the modifiers tab and set the imported armature as the Object property.
If keeping the original armature is important, it's harder and I haven't tried it but it should still be doable: export the vRoid model with correct bone hairs, import it in Blender, from the imported model delete everything except the armature and the hair mesh, from the imported armature delete all bones except the hair ones, from the original model delete the hair mesh, then in Object Mode while having nothing selected select the imported armature, then the original armature (the order is important) then ctrl+J to join.
I think it's the default? Even if you check in Camera mode and try to create wind and stuff, it won't move as well.
I typically just do three bones; front, middle and back.
By the way, I've looked into World Lighting now and it is very helpful.
Looking at my own images from earlier, it turns out I forgot a guiding principle of vRoid fashion; bodies shift color to the basic setting when you change outfits.
There's a noticeable difference between L.Star's face and body in my first renders, and it's not because of the light. I'll have to redo this look, but I had to do that anyways.
I went through the whole thread to see where I'd improved and where I was sort of the same, and I think;
Most obviously, I learned Blender. I hope by Page 3 my blending skills level up significantly.
Current progress as per tutorials:
This is the full work/render in Eevee, using dark blue World lighting and World-based fog. Oddly enough it came out tinged with some sort of green, I think? It looks better than I thought it did earlier.
In Cycles, the fog and lighting really took over the environment. You can barely see anything else. However, the emissions on my materials (especially the rock monster eyes) really stood out, so that's nice.
Here it is with the fog off and the World Lighting modified darker. You can see where all the lights are meant to go much better. In Cycles, it's quite obvious I'd placed the spotlight on the streetlight slightly off, but Eevee is less precise and for some reason people treat that as a bad thing <_<
The Sun "Moon" light behind the monster also looks much better.
However, no lighting would show up on my guy's face, probably because I switched his light from a... ehhhh... whatever the typical one is called, to a spotlight. I ended up just not bothering with an angle on his face.
This is already pretty Halloween themed, but I had an idea to do something with my vRoids in a spooky context. I wonder if I could pull it off before the day...
I've been looking for more tutorials to follow but haven't found anything about something I'd like to create. I'll keep looking anyways.
There were three main things in terms of this project;
I also managed to use two materials (thank you edit mode panels). I rendered this via Cycles because it made my wood texture look better, but then when I checked Eevee again it looked okay, but I'd already made it.
More important project, a mysterious cave;
I only used one new technique here; the simple deformation for the cave mouth, though this was also my first time messing with bevels I guess.
I was going to have my vRoids stand in front of the cave like they were exploring, but I'm yet to figure out how to permanently fuse my armature to the vRoid object, which means the armature won't follow my vRoid anywhere unless I grab both objects at once.
Anyways, this means no rotating vRoids. Trying to use the giant armature whilst my vRoid is tiny or otherwise elsewhere results in a lot of shenanigans, so I just decided to make my Halloween project the cave.
Or did I?
Hmm, I wonder what that shadow is!
Oh my, it's a mysterious witch! This role was also meant to be occupied by a vRoid, but a couple of cones and cylinders later and this came out pretty okay. I tried to create a nice pattern on the front of her dress but cones are not the loop cut's friend.
I wondered about creating a more complex set up, like a cupcake store or similar, but I've been wary about parenting lots of tiny objects to a bigger one because it turns out parented objects only move when you move the parent and you can really screw up otherwise. It seems too fussy for a single afternoon, so it'd require much more work.
As I am right now, I think all I really need to learn before I try rigging and animation is sculpting, and that seems like it'll be quite a bit of work.
Anyways I remember @Stormtroper you once made me a pinata for my birthday and I want to try my hand at that. IIRC it looked complicated.
Ah, it wasn't the pinatas that were complicated, it was everything else.
Edit: I think I'll work on something for Halloween too. That's odd, child (non-bone) objects should still be able to move freely. Are you sure it's parenting what you're doing? Normally you'd do that by parenting the mesh objects to the armature, but if you're having problems with parenting it's not worth it. I actually intended to create a full-on piñata, but I ran into trouble trying to make those little strips of paper piñatas have all around, so I opted to make another cake.
It wasn't that complicated, over time I've learned to several techniques for easy cake-making.
You're probably going to be interested in the .blend file. If you have any questions, feel free to ask:
Yeah I'm pretty certain I'm not parenting right, but I'll figure it out eventually.
I made the most original Halloween-related item ever conceived:
Fortunately the bug logo kinda sorta looks like a face.
I felt daring and used both subsurface scattering (SSS, the thing that makes it look translucent) and fog, both performance murderers. The latter was a mistake, but it was a given that the former was necessary and I actually don't think it affected render times that much.
I ran into trouble at the last minute, especially regarding UV mapping, I couldn't get it to work right with multiple mappings nor was the material even taking it into consideration (it's why it's completely SSS-y orange, rather than also having a green/brown solid-looking stem and more random coloured splotches). Also I'm pretty sure there's a light source that wasn't supposed to be there. Also the floorboard.
Also the noise but that's a given.Holy crap I just tried the denoiser node and it's wonderful! (This is how it was before post-processing.)The jagged edges around the cut-off weren't intentional, they're an artifact of a couple modifiers I used to make the cut-off, but I'd say it actually looks better that way. Ditto for the lines around the rim. I'm not sure if the grainy part of the surface is an artifact from the denoiser node but that looks realistic, I think.
Ah, the very heart of all CG projects.
Lest I forget, I watched this tutorial. I didn't follow it, just kinda skimmed it, it was useful to make sure that the end result would look okay.
I had a morale boost from working on that. Normally when a project gets complicated and my computer starts slowing down or it's time to make longish renders I get discouraged and often end up dropping it. OTOH with the denoise node and recent changes to sculpting I feel like I can do more with only a fraction of the annoyance. I'm not sure but I feel like subsurface scattering was behaving more nicely too.
I should just make more bench cubes.
What's the problem you're having? Perhaps I can help. I can take a look at the .blend file if need be.
In Edit Mode, I cannot figure out how to move vertices right once I turn on the area-of-influence thing. I was trying to make a long setup of rocks via simple deform look nice and it's just not coming out right.
Mainly I was trying to modify some planes in edit mode and nothing was working right even with loop cuts creating vertices where I wanted and which should have allowed me to extrude things properly.
And beginner's mistake; I worked on a bunch of in Edit Mode with my "rocks" and instead of pressing A I had been box-selecting everything like this is Paint or something and so I spent ten minutes creating one rock surrounded by sixteen lunch cartons.
Also I have this bad habit of scaling things before taking them into edit mode which makes them act wonky for some reason. I noticed that the same things work fine if I don't scale anything before I go into edit mode. This might be linked to the second problem but I tried it the other way and the plane was still not behaving..
I don't think these are like, real problems or anything, just basic stuff I'll probably get through tomorrow.
Same goes for translation and rotation (the other object transforms), though those are less likely to cause trouble. You may be able to undo the problem by using the Apply Object Transform operator (making sure to select the Scale option and deselect whichever you don't want)).
While we're at it, you may want to get into the habit of working to scale, that if a rock is supposed to be 1 m tall or something "in-universe" , that it's 1 m tall in Blender too. Not working to scale is not likely to cause that kind of trouble but it influences lighting setups, material properties, etc. so working to scale gets you consistent results with these. It occurs to me that you could duplicate the rock several times, tweak them a little to make them look different and have that be your rock formation.
As for the area-of-influence proportional editing feature, it's going to be hard to give hints without seeing it.
I'm guessing you already know you can tweak its size and mode (smooth, random, etc.), right? It also often helps to work with as little detail as possible at a time, to tweak it while it only has a few vertices and when you've done what you can, subdivide or edge cut and repeat until you're satisfied.
Yeah I noticed that happens a lot.
Oh so that's what was happening! I tried making a ring of rocks but even when I set the origin to geometry it wouldn't sit in the center just right (and then involve a lot of unnecessary movement).
This sounds hard.
Ah kay I'll post caps when I work on it later.
This makes so much sense.