A Change in Workflow and Style pt.2

After posting my first photo set a few weeks ago, I decided my characters could 
use some improvements, particularly their faces and expressions.

After my first change in workflow and style, I was happy with how my characters 
looked but I started to realize how far they were from having that "anime" 
look. And so I slowly began to tweak my characters more to find the look 
I truly wanted.

In short, I've only made a few tweaks to my characters but it took awhile to 
get them right.



I changed the eye shape significantly, I always thought my models had that 
"anime" look to them, but the eyes were far too small and I held myself back 
by trying to get a spherical eyeball to work with an anime artstyle. 

I made the hair have slightly less bump, which gives it a flatter look. I also 
decided to not use textures for clothes, in order to speed up my workflow and 
have more flexibility if I use clothes made by other artists. This results in 
a small drop of quality but makes clothes less tedious to work with. 

And finally, I changed from using Freestyle to draw an outline in 
post-processing to instead having a "real" outline using the common convex hull 
method. I avoided this method in the past because I couldn't get it to work 
right with my model, but I finally figured how to get it to work in the end. 
Freestyle was both slow and somewhat unpredictable with how well it drew 
lines, so a static outline should work better.

I am now more confident that I should be able to not just make original 
characters, but characters from popular anime and video game series too and 
have them look appealing. Every character will need their own tweaks to get 
things right, but having a solid foundation to start with will be great.

I hope that these will be the final changes that I make for awhile. I can't 
afford to go back to the drawing board after every photo set I post of course. 
But I felt like it was best to do all of this now, while I don't have a 
fanbase and nobody is expecting regular content.

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