[WARNING: THIS DESCRIPTION IS MUCH LONGER THAN I INTENDED IT TO BE, I PROMISE I WON'T BE OFFENDED IF YOU DON'T BOTHER READING IT ALL, I DIDN'T REALIZE HOW MUCH I HAD TYPED UNTIL I WAS DONE WITH IT AND IT TOOK SO LONG I DON'T WANNA CUT IT DOWN AND HAVE WASTED ALL THAT TIME]


Gonna be dumping some 3D stuff I did earlier this year, because I don't JUST draw, I'm also learning how to use Blender. I'm not totally new to 3D stuff, when I was a kid I played around with a program called Swift 3D a lot. It was kinda crappy, there wasn't much you could do with it besides put textures on basic geometric shapes like spheres and cylinders, anything more complex had to be made out of those shapes floating in place, and the only way to rig a model to be animated was to parent each segment to each other and move the pivot point to where the joint would be. It wasn't so bad if you were trying to imitate the look of a PS1 game, I actually think low-poly stuff was easier to make in that program than it is in Blender, but usually that wasn't what I was trying to do, I wanted my models to look as detailed and high-quality as they possibly could. I'm lucky enough to still have some of them:

https://images2.imgbox.com/ea/35/cNNR4VO3_o.jpg
https://images2.imgbox.com/ef/fe/3DkoxIIK_o.jpg
https://images2.imgbox.com/0f/3c/g9g9lF9l_o.jpg

Yeah, they look like crap, but you just gotta take my word for it, I was actually pretty good at using the program, that was just the best it could really do. Well, aside from the textures. Those actually make a much bigger difference. The benefit though is that that made it simple enough that a middle schooler could figure it out pretty quickly. It also helped that its UI was very similar to Flash which I was already intimately familiar with at the time, and it could even output animations in swf so they were compatible with Flash. The problem is that it wasn't really meant for making detailed character rigs, it was really only meant for making spinning logos that you'd put on your website. The more objects make up your model, the more likely it is that it would just break in a way I'm not sure how to describe. You'd lose the ability to rotate the object and instead "sheer" it, it would like stretch in the direction you try to rotate it in, and as far as I could find there was no way to fix it. Save and reopen the file, Copy all the objects and paste them in a new file, delete some objects and reduce the detail to try to free up some memory, no matter what it would still do that. The only solution would be to start over. And that would happen if just one model was too detailed, now imagine if you imported a second model and that brought the number of objects to the breaking point. If there was any solution to it, nobody online was sharing it, mostly because Swift was never a very popular program in the first place, there wasn't a big community sharing solutions like there is with Blender. I distinctly remember the glitch happening while making Mr. Mime from Pokemon was the final straw, I had it with Swift and upgraded to Blender.

At first I was pretty satisfied with the fact that all my spheres and cylinders models could have as many spheres and cylinders as I wanted without the program falling over and pooping its pants, I'm lucky enough to still have the first one of those I made too:

https://images2.imgbox.com/77/5f/wrse2Xbf_o.gif

But then I'd see stuff other people made in Blender, stuff Blender posted to their official YouTube channel specifically to advertise what the program could do:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brLbwajyGNI

Back when I was using Swift, I had no expectations, of the tools or of myself. I didn't think anything of the fact that my models didn't look even remotely professional. The kind of detailed character rigs you see in movies or even in newer video games from the time, I thought nobody had the tools necessary to make those unless they worked for a company like Pixar or Dreamworks. Normal people couldn't just download that shit to their home computers, and if they could it probably cost millions of dollars or something, you wouldn't be able to download it for FREE, or at least not legally right from the company's own website, I had no idea it would actually be THAT much better than Swift, but now you were telling me that the free program I just downloaded right from the company's own website could actually do somewhat professional stuff!? Like sure that rabbit movie doesn't look Pixar-tier, but I'd say it's at least on par with a TV production like Jimmy Neutron or that Casper show that aired on Cartoon Network, hell if anything it looks BETTER than those! Well now I hate these crappy spheres and cylinders models! I wanna make something that looks like that! It was time to get to work, time to buckle my fuckle, unfortunately I was like 14 or 15, I didn't have the patience to buckle a belt let alone my fuckle, and I also wasn't smart enough to try multiple tutorials. If the first tutorial I watched showed me how to do it in an unintuitive way, I assumed that's how it was supposed to be done, which would give me the impression that the skill was more tedious to learn than it actually was, and tempt me to drop it completely.

The first tutorial I watched, the dude manually dropped every vertice into place with machine-levels of precision, it was like in the Pixar Story documentary where they talk about the guy who typed in some coordinates and got a perfect elephant on the first try. Between both of those examples it just seemed like that's how 3D modeling worked, and although I probably could have learned to do it like that, it wasn't FUN to learn how to do it like that. I've never been the kind of person that drops a new skill just because I'm not good at it right away, frankly those kinds of people bug the shit out of me. There are some things that some people other than me claim I'm good at, and the thing all those skills have in common is that they were fun and I found them rewarding even when I wasn't good at them yet. And manually dropping vertices with no visual reference for where to put them and fussing with their placement because if one is even a micrometer out of place it throws off everything, resulting in faces that looks like THIS-:

https://images2.imgbox.com/c5/17/81OEIRvQ_o.png (this is not Voldemort, this character was supposed to be a clown, that's why I didn't bother with the nose, I was just gonna use a default sphere for the nose)

-was not very fun! So because I was too young and stupid to consider that maybe that guy was some kind of masochist and the Pixar animators were making that elephant in the 80s when the technology was so new that only three years earlier, lightning striking a computer plugged into a Barbie doll while the users had bras on their heads turning said Barbie doll into a real woman was considered a plausible premise for a movie, 3D modeling and animation started to seem like it wasn't for me, something I'd have to appreciate from a distance.

From then on all I really used Blender for was blocking out environments or complicated props to use as reference when drawing because perspective has never been a strong suit of mine. Stuff like an entertainment setup with a TV and consoles, the Duel Disk from Yugioh, the motorcycle thing from Jak and Daxter, the Doom Ship from Mario, the foyer from Luigi's Mansion so I can draw it from an angle you normally can't see in the game, the arcade area from the Toy Story 2 game for the same reason, etc. Don't really need to know how to make much more than spheres and cylinders if you're just gonna draw over it anyway.

Then as a Christmas gift in 2022, I got a 3D printer, and that was how I learned just how much the price of them had gone down since I'd first heard of them and then immediately stopped paying attention when I found out what they cost, because the same quality of printers that went for thousands ten years prior you can now get for the price of a game console, making them still pretty expensive, but not prohibitively so for most people. THAT gave me a reason to give Blender another shot, find a different tutorial that isn't from a masochist, and without even updating Blender just yet, (so I know this option existed back then and wasn't introduced in newer versions) found out that the way most people do it starts exactly how I was originally doing it, they block it out with the default shapes like all my old models, then they merge them together with the boolean modifyer, remesh them until there's a ridiculous amount of polygons, then smooth out all the seams in sculpt mode. Sculpting in Blender is downright easy, especially when all you intend to do with the model is print it, because then there's not much reason to move onto the retopology step, you're just done right there!

At that point I was satisfied, I knew enough about how to use Blender to do with it what I still wanted to do. I had given up my animation dream years prior so there wasn't much reason to learn how to rig models to animate, let alone make models designed to be animated.

But then not long after that, Digital Circus came out, and was a massive hit immediately. It's another one of those things I described before where I can't explain it objectively, it's something I feel with my heart more than my brain, but something about the simple art style and character designs and the way it's rendered, not quite like an N64 game but rather like the SGI renders on the boxart, had some kind of effect on me. I think the feeling is validation. I'll probably never have the knowhow or skill to make something that looks like Pixar or Dreamworks or even Jimmy Neutron, and if I did I'll probably never afford a computer that wouldn't catch fire trying to render it, let alone like a thousand of them because even with those powerful machines it still takes Pixar movies days to render a single frame, but I can probably make something that looks like Digital Circus. Sure without a budget to hire a team of animators like they have it wouldn't be as polished, the animation probably not as energetic or fluid, but if I work smarter instead of harder, maybe I can design it in a way where that looks natural.

I'm pretty sure even with their budget they still had to do that. After learning enough to make this model right here (yeah, this description is underneath a picture in case you forgot, let's finally talk about it), I don't think the retro art style and segmented character designs were JUST because Gooseworx thought they'd look cool like that, because the way Pomni's built basically skips like half the weight-painting you'd have to do on a model that's all one mesh. Weight painting is already the most tedious part besides maybe retopology, and I find that the hardest parts to weight paint are the shoulders, hips, and wrists, which Pomni's model likely doesn't have. You can tell by the way Pomni's arms stick out of her armsleeve when in a neutral post that they're not actually attached to anything unless they're bending at a perfect right-angle inside those spheres:

https://images2.imgbox.com/3b/5b/5L7ChsDG_o.jpg

And with her hands being gloved, you wouldn't have to worry about making the wrists rotatable without them twisting shut until they look like two sausage links, because you can just rotate the separate glove piece and it would look just the same, and I wouldn't be surprised if Pomni was designed specifically to take advantage of that, like how Yogi Bear wears a collar to hide the fact that his head's on another cel, so if he's just standing there talking they only have to redraw his head on every frame.

I came to that conclusion from making this model, because I had such a hard time getting Circe's thighs and ass to bend right that I just broke them off, then did the same to her arms, head, and boobs, even though those weren't giving me nearly as much trouble, just so it's consistent, then made the materials shinier to commit to the aesthetic, and made the lighting shittier on purpose just to finish it off, so now if anyone asks I can just say I was deliberately imitating the look of the old Donkey Kong cartoon and nobody would have to know otherwise. I figured out how to get the ass and thighs to bend right some time after this, so now I can make models that are all one mesh, because I didn't wanna use knowing an easier way as an excuse not to learn how, know the rules before you break them as they say, but once I feel like I know enough of the rules to move forward on something, this is probably what it'll look like because doing it like this saves a lot of headache, so thank you Digital Circus for giving me a reason to learn that and also showing me that wanting to do it like that doesn't have to be a bad thing