Continuing with the rest of the year goal to level up my rigging/modeling skills, with rigging goal to level up both manual and knowledge of using auto rigging tools, I created another 3D model. Still in September, I got to play a bit of a game called: ”Spiritfarer” from Thunder Lotus studio. It was a completely different feel from the previous violent games I played like The Last of Us 2 and Ghost of Tsushima. The pace was much calmer, there wasn’t violent, bloor or gore. I loved the 2D style, ofcourse in particular the main character Stella. Like my previous model I created this year, I started with sculpting in Zbrush and retopo in Maya. The challenge of this time was creating a better facial loop for animation and for the first time ever, sculpting hair. Both were not easy. I tried to use a hair sculpting tool and manual sculpting. When retopo in Maya, I tried to be mindful about the memory cost and kept the mesh as light as I can with my current modeling skill.
This time I experiment rigging with mGear again, I can’t recall what version was it but the main point was to see if there were any updates to the rig system that improved certain features that 2.52 lack (an old version we used at work) One of the tests to see deformation flexibility that I did was to pose out Stella hugging Aang (made by Rigstation) I thought it was perfect since Aang can visit the spirit world. Stella in the game is known for being a hugger. This was a perfect opportunity. I didn’t have time to do more than a couple of simple animations but nothing worth showing.
After this experiment, I started to realized something: It would take a lot more practices and training to get better at modeling/texturing. As much as I really enjoy doing it, I realized the skills are not as essential to my career as an animator. They are nice to have definitely but animation already require a lot of time and training to get good, splitting up the time that I do have began to feel not as beneficial. My animation skills still need to get better, which require more mileage, more time spend into it. I decided to to leave modeling/texture goals in the back log in order to focus on skills that will benefit my future more.