A Change in Workflow and Style

TL;DR, I decided to focus on making photo sets instead of animations, and I 
improved my characters' faces to look better and have better facial expressions.

I wasn't completely happy with my first photo set that I released last week, so 
I decided to take some time to reflect and research on what could be improved or 
changed.

-A Change in Workflow-

The idea felt like it was good, but the overall execution felt lacking. I felt 
like the lighting could be better, the facial expressions could be less stiff, 
the train could have more details, the list goes on. The scene may have been 
suitable for an animation, but was lacking for a few photos. At least compared 
to some other 3D artists that I look up to like Beanis or IceDev who make their 
photos very detailed.

As I've been learning Blender for the past 2 years I wasn't sure if I wanted to 
focus more on animations or photo sets, but when I started to try rendering 
simple scenes in Cycles I realized that it wasn't going to be very viable to 
render animations with my computer specs. Cycles is the realistic lighting 
render engine of Blender while Eevee is their realtime render engine.

So that got me thinking. Would I rather make photos and take 
advantage of realistic lighting, or make animations and use Eevee so it doesn't 
take multiple days just to render something? The benefit of animations is that 
they are quite a popular art medium, while the benefit of photo sets is that I 
can have more control and quality in each frame.

And with that, I decided to change my workflow. I will probably make short 
little animations from time to time, but nothing like I was planning in the 
past having them be several minutes long. I will now focus on making high 
quality photos and photo sets, and not having to worry about animation I can 
put all that time towards all the little details and editing that turn a basic 
render into a pretty piece.


-A Change in Style-


In addition, not worrying about animations allows for a few more creative 
freedoms since I have complete control over each individual frame. I don't 
have to worry about long render times and I can edit and add effects as I 
please.

The biggest thing I wanted to change were my character's faces, to make sure 
that they can have cute and expressive anime-like expressions and not ones that 
feel stiff or unnatural. Since I don't need to rely on a face rig so much for 
animation anymore, I could experiment freely with finding something that simply 
looks good and not about if it will work with the rig.



I changed the eyes to be bigger and lower down on the face, and close more 
naturally with additional bones I added to the rig.

I also decided to get rid of the lips completely, and replace them with a flat 
mouth, which will allow me to make more cartoonish and exaggerated expressions.



"Realistic" lips always feel a bit off to me. They look good on their own but feel 
lacking when it comes to expressions unless you use motion capture or have an 
advanced rig and high level of posing skill. Flat lips on the other hand are 
fun to work with and look good in more exaggerated poses.

Beyond that, I changed a few other small things like adding more detail to the 
clothes I've made so far, changing the pupil texture on my characters, 
improving the mesh in a few areas, and adding a freestyle line pass for the 
final render. I think all of this will lead to a more "polished" feeling for my 
finished works.

And so at this point, I don't feel so limited by my model anymore, and now it's 
my job to make the most of out them!

I think that's all I have to say for now. If you have any questions be sure to 
leave a comment.

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