Creating the set and using addons

 Hello, I'm back with another update on what I've been doing. Not very consistent with these logs, but I feel like now I have a big enough progress log for it to be actually worth it to put together. Moving forward, I probably won't put too many youtube video links like I have previously. I'm finding myself watching a lot of videos and only gleaming them, to get what I need out of it, not the same as the days prior where I sat down and learned everything from scratch. Of course, I'll still be doing so, but just not to the same amount like before so don't expect a lot of links like last time.

PROGRESS

To start things off, I began by constructing the set, the whole shot will take place on. It's not finished by any means and I'll look to add things to make it pop out more. This is the first time I've actually modeled and tried out shaders by myself, so there was a large learning curve and many hours just watching tutorials and figuring things out, especially with shortcut usage and also how the tool functions. I won't be linking any of those tutorials I've watched since it was just gleaming through them to find out how to use an option. 

The beginning

I began with a multitude of references. Notably, I looked up a parkour across Paris in trying to wrap my head around where the scene is located. Paris. A place, I've never been too and never ever been on a rooftop for.

The references

Modeling out a basic hand rail shape along with walls.

In general, the basic modeling of simple walls and rails wasn't too hard, but what came next certainly was. I also modeled out a pipe on the roof, it doesn't look right without the camera view (don't need to work on pieces where the camera won't ever see. The hard part was to come. Getting the right materials.

Still working on figuring out the whole materials stuff, a lot of math and mapping nodes to actually tile the texture so it won't look bad. Overall, not very happy with the result, so I'll spend some time later figuring out a better way, espcially to get the light to reflect and bounce of properly to light the scene. It honestly feels very daunting, the amount of things I need to learn to actually apply to the scene to make it not look horrible.

Taking a break from this all, I took a step back, back towards rigging characters. To be honest, the way I rigged things were very rudimentary and actually hurt my progress in animating. Workflow. The most important thing I want to optimize. It dictates the amount of time I need to spend on a scene to actually make it look good. If there are shortcuts to take, places to optimize, I will do everything I can to actually do so. Which brings me back a step, rigging.

I began with Chat Noir. Using the plugin, Auto Rig Pro. Everything was made pretty quickly which is awesome. Of course, using an addon is also a whole new learning opportunity so it took a whole day from me, figuring out the best places to put the bones for the best movement, also the best way for a model to morph properly

Nightmares with face rigging and meshes not properly, cut out.

Skin clipping through clothes which I found a work around with...

Cursed work around method. Extrude the head mesh downwards deeper into the body. Sculpt any other bits to make sure the head was overall, smaller than the clothes so it won't clip into the body mesh anymore.

So with the body done, I began thinking of the face. The face is arguably one of the most important parts of an animation. There expression is what dictates and gives life to the character so I settled on a solution to help me animate the faces. Motion capture, specifically for the mouth to emulate talking and maybe help with facial expressions. I can't fully depend on it as the characters I'm rigging aren't human and will in fact suffer if I only stick to the normal confines of human expression. The addon I rolled with is faceit, a blender addon to create facial shapekeys for motion capture and more. This also took some time, but now the model is really coming together.

Fully rigged up with face. Also contained a lot of cursed work arounds, such as joining the mesh on the face to the head...

Now with the body rigged along with the face, I turned to his hair. I am not happy with the model's hair. Since it was ripped directly from a game, the hair is well, an optimized, over glorified png image that is meant to interact with the game's lighting system, something not in blender. It looks fine in plain lighting and it would probably look fine in any light source, it just didn't look right as Chat Noir.

Look at how different the show's hair is. It also moves!

With a handful of references, I began to think of ways to make his hair actually like hair. I perused some 3D sites and found myself another chat noir model and took his hair. With a simple shader, I quickly created with hair pngs. It was done.

It was... Okay at best. Overall the model was fairly low poly, which made for a horrible overall look especially on the high poly count that these models had. So with no other choice, I bit the bullet and sank two days on learning how to make hair, good hair. Thankfully, I found a really good tutorial. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXuReln3XD0. Thank you so much lightning boy shaders for having such a great tutorial. Of course, it wasn't a straight up follow the tutorial. He is using blender 3.0, while the newest blender version I want to use is 4.2. So... there were a lot of workarounds and problems that I needed to make this work, but I eventually did make it work.

 

The hair shader is done, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

 

The node tree.

With the shader done, it was time to model... It was... A lot.

Final product.

With a lot of time later, it was done. A fully kitted out shader hair with hair physics too! The next step was actually attaching the hair to the model. Unfortunately, this also came with a multitude of problems I should have forseen. The end hair product consisted of 52 different emitters that couldn't be easily managed.

Pro tip, if you want to bind it to the model, Parent the hair meshes to the bone as a bone. (I spent 3 hours trying to figure out how to even make sure the hair went with the body.)

The final completed rig, hair physics and all.

Conclusion

The Chat Noir model is now finished. I'm ready and happy with the results. If I'm not, I could easily adjust the settings in the hair, head, or anything really which makes it really flexible. Next up, rigging up the Ladybug model. The original one I had worked, but I might as well bite the bullet now, to make sure the workflow is as optimized as possible. This also means a complete rework of the animation with the new model. At first this looks like a waste of time, but it really isn't since now I will have a better rig to animate faster and most importantly a rig that can easily convey facial expressions!!!