I've been working on three projects at a time lately, as much of a bad idea as that is....
So I've finished project Xiahou Ba finally, though I'm looking to get a small animation of him rendered out at some point, so will wait until then before posting his final renders. Since then, I have started a torso sculpt using Xiahou Ba as a base. The final outcome however, should look nothing like him. He will also be a simple sculpt, nothing more.
Alongside this, I have been recreating my old Jo White project, mostly to address her low quality yet high resolution texture issues. However, when I started to look at these issues I found a bunch more with her general design that I will now address too. These were all problems caused by not spending enough time on parts of her, especially towards the end of the project.
My third project came to me while watching the original 'Fullmetal Alchemist' anime, as well as seeing what Koei have been creating with toon-shaders: 'Arslan Warriors'. This is the subject of this post.
This is my 'State Alchemist' model so far. The end result is a hope of a reasonably low resolution model that makes use of toon shaders to look like anime.
The above image shows some design ideas behind the model, as well as future corrections, and a quick paint-over to figure out details later on. Many of the details will be achieved through texture maps as opposed to geometry to keep polycount down for this project.
The first image shows blue arrows following the extended cloth areas. They signify that on the final model, these parts of the model will be rigged up to be dynamic cloth. They are modelled spread open like this to give them more surface area, allowing them to crumple and fold more realistically when gravity takes hold over them.
The second image shows areas that need correction after studying the design I'm going for.
