Ninette is my latest and greatest attempt at creating a cute and appealing anime-style character model. She started as a completely different style of character and evolved through about 3 different facial reconstructions until I was able to capture the style of popular models on Pixiv’s Booth.pm platform commonly used by VRChat users. She was built as a low poly model and painted in GIMP and Blender, and her clothing was created using a high-to-low poly workflow and textured in Substance Painter.
You can use Ninette on VRChat, as a VTuber, in your game, or video project! She is for sale on both Booth.pm and Gumroad.
I had a desire to create a prop pistol for an avatar I was using, and set out to find refrences to capture “The Gun.” You know the one. That imposing silhouette from both the side and front; the shape your brain conjures when you imagine a character explicitly deciding “the buck stops here.” It’s no mistake then that I landed on the 1911 as the model to make. It’s been used as the basis for nearly every famous pistol in media. Lara Croft wields 2 of these in several of her depictions. Agent 47’s world-famous Silverballers are based on the AMT Hardballer, a 1911 variant. Dante’s Ebony and Ivory are custom 1911s. I decided on the classic GI-style and got to work. Using some techniques I learned from a Chamfer Zone tutorial, I created a high poly frame with floating details, then baked them to a low poly base and textured it all using Substance Painter. Still one of my favorite projects to date.
Somewhat of a passing thought after a few friends and I were sharing pictures of these sort of “dungeon in a bed” bits of furniture. I wanted to design a stylish and “useful” bed, plus it gave me an excuse to try some fun Marvelous Designer techniques. It also let me try out CGCookie’s great Retopoflow addon to retopologize the high poly cloth parts. The frame was built as a low poly asset using custom vertex normals for better shading and everything was textured in Substance Painter.
An outfit made for a school-themed event in VRChat. I wanted to combine the more modern Blazer-style uniforms with the classic Sailor themed ones, and found a design that combined them. Created as most of my clothing is using a sort of hybrid high-to-low poly workflow, and textured in Substance Painter.
Another event-themed outfit for VRChat. This time it was Dungeons and Dragons day. I looked up some more generic adventurer garb and set off on my usual workflow. About midway through I started getting into detail on how sword belts were worn and learned a lot, so you’ll find the sword belt on this outfit to be quite accurate. Textured again using Substance Painter, whose brushes and texture generators came in real handy for adding some quick and dirty detail to flesh it out.
Using Valentine’s Day as an excuse to do a more ruffly outfit, I made this mostly to experiment with what was at the time a new feature in Blender: The Boundary Brush sculpting tool. It made short work of the various skirt layers. Sculpting the details here was a lot of fun, and I like my little openings for my character’s wings on the back of the blouse.
An asset I did for a project that never really came to fruition; I nonetheless had a ton of fun making it. After being given the initial reference, I looked up the exact model of vending machine, got precise dimensions, and additional reference to capture all the small details on the face of the machine. Textures were the most fun, though. There was a time long ago when I had an inkling to get into graphic design, so creating fake branding that still evokes the feel of real ones was a fun opportunity to exercise the skills I was learning back then.