#tailii

[csleko]

Tailii 3D Model (WIP)

In all the years I've been posting 3D models and renders, have you ever noticed there's one very specific thing I NEVER make?

Humans.

Okay, that's not *technically* true. I've done a few low-poly human characters, and sculpted one or two, but I haven't made an actual decent quality animation model since my college animation classes. And even those weren't very good.

This is actually a big factor in why I prefer making objects and scenes rather than characters, and why when I *do* make a character, it's usually a robot or weird creature. Stuff I can model or sculpt without a care in the world for how the topology turns out. If I'm sculpting it, there's a good chance it's probably something I want to 3D print, so any rigging is bare bones just to pose the model. Assuming I don't just sculpt it in the pose to begin with.

Low-poly modeling still requires a bit of attention to topology, but it's mostly making sure the joints work properly. (Knees and elbows bend the right way without distorting the rest of the model too much.)

But this? A smooth, subdivided model capable of facial expressions and mouth movement? Was a pain in the ass for me, and I couldn't figure out why for the longest time.

But then last year I started getting back into drawing again. Just random stuff for the sake of practice. Not even saving 90% of what I draw, and not even posting half of the 10% I liked enough to save. I was paying closer attention to how I drew faces, and tried to develop my style by nudging the needle just a bit closer to realistic and consistent.

And at some point something clicked. I had watched a few Blender tutorials on how to model faces with good topology, but when I tried following along something wasn't sticking. But it all suddenly made sense when I realized I could model faces by breaking them down in almost exactly the same way I was drawing them.

I always took it for granted that a background in 2D art was obviously helpful in developing 3D designs, but I finally UNDERSTAND it now.

And yeah, this is the model I spent all day yesterday working on. I am DAMN proud of it. Ignore the cloth simulation and anything else you think you see in these renders. I just wanted to show off how good her face turned out.

[leko-library]

First Tailii Drawings (2006)

Well, I don't actually have a lot to say about the design and concept process this one that I didn't already say when I made a certain other post a few years ago.

The colored version was my first ever post on DeviantART, and I don't think the original sketch ever made it there. (It might have been in my "scraps" folder, but I can't confirm that.)

I don't recall if the colored version was based on a sketch, now that I think about it. I definitely remember the head and face coming pretty much straight out of a "How to Draw Manga" book, but I think I just drew it directly in Flash.

I'll have to dig up my old sketchbooks and see if I'm remembering that correctly. I might have based it on this original sketch and just made changes as I traced and colored it.

But yeah. I did a lot of my early drawings and comics in Flash of all things because I hated trying to do line art in Photoshop. Being able to precisely drag lines around and fill in colors quickly without worrying about aliasing giving everything fuzzy outlines just made everything so much easier.

Unfortunately, being 15 at the time I couldn't actually afford Flash, and as good with computers as I was, I wasn't good enough to figure out how to get a working "yar-har" copy. I ended up with like 4 Adobe accounts so I could keep using the free trials.

Then in 2009 I was getting ready to graduate from high school, and was taking a couple of college courses early to get a jump on that. They were just basic Photoshop and Flash courses that I needed credits for, but they gave me an excuse to finally legally purchase a copies of Flash and Photoshop CS4 at a significant academic discount.

And I never had to put on a disguise to get another trial again.

[sprite-o-verse]

Episode 40

[csleko]

Leko: Literally is a robot, so definitely has strong opinions and thoughts on such matters.

Zan: Is familiar with the concepts. Being something of a fantasy/sci-fi geek, having an advanced robot who invents copies of fictional technologies for fun as a best friend is just about the coolest thing ever.

Tailii: Doesn’t really fully comprehend what a “robot” or “artificial intelligence” is, and doesn’t really care. She talks to Leko, he talks back like anyone else. As far as she’s concerned robots are just smart metal people who can take themselves apart.

York: Is more or less in the same boat as Tailii. Doesn’t get it, doesn’t care.

Buddy: His loose grasp of reality and inability to coherently express *any* thoughts or opinions makes this a difficult question to solidly answer. He *thinks* Leko is a shiny friend, but has also “befriended” numerous inanimate objects in the past.

Does your OC have any opinions or other thoughts regarding artificial intelligence? (Should they?)

[robphoto71]

comme partout, l’abandon des sites mène à la disparition de ceux-ci dans le paysage de tailiis et buissons.

[csleko]

What if Comic Shorts...but Star Wars?

Random idea I had a little while ago to redesign Comic Shorts characters as if they were from the Star Wars universe. I started with Tailii, and eventually made the rest in Hero Forge, so that's what's going on in this post.

Tailii Raisa, human female. Throughout her career as a "treasure hunter" she has built up quite a collection of curiosities such as a Nightsister sword, a beskar pauldron, a restored antique blaster, pieces of Phase I Clone Trooper armor (painted to match her look), and a "lucky vest" she stole from an auction (the seller dubiously claimed it originally belonged to a famous smuggler).

Zanshlou, Mirialan male. Raised on exciting stories of bounty hunter adventures, Zan entered the profession at a young age hoping to find an epic story of his own to some day tell. Unfortunately, though he is competent, the ever growing number of bounty hunters in the galaxy is making it quite challenging to stand out.

---

I originally had Zan as another human, but I figured he needed a little something to be more Star Wars-y and not just "kinda cyberpunky version of his original design." Mirialans (usually) have greenish skin, dark hair and face tattoos, so I thought that'd be perfect for Zan who's trying to build his brand as a mysterious ninja.

York, Duros male. An experimental treatment for the rare skin condition that robbed him of his species' typical blue/green pigmentation has left him with significant memory loss. After assassinating the head of the medical company responsible, York went on to become a prolific hitman preferring to take jobs targeting shady corporate officers who believe their wealth makes them untouchable. He is all too happy to prove them wrong.

---

York and Buddy were a challenge. In our canon universe, they're the same type of creature. (That being a faceless pale humanoid with large black eyes.) There's not really an equivalent in the Star Wars universe, so I had to get really creative here. I ended up making York a Duros since they *kind of* have the look I wanted to go for, but their coloration is in the blue to green range, so I decided he could just have a skin condition that makes it white. My main concern is he comes off as too Cad Bane-like with his signature hat and being the same species, but whatever. Everything's a ripoff of something.

"Buddy," Umbaran male. The creature known to the group only as "Buddy" is an oddity among oddities. Unbeknownst to his companions (and even himself), rather than being simply "Force sensitive" he is actually Force *hypersensitive* to the point where his mind is completely overrun by a seemingly infinite number of voices constantly feeding him conflicting interpretations of the "will of the Force." While able to speak and understand Basic, the majority of his speech comes out as unintelligible gibberish, though during brief moments of near lucidity he does express a consistent delusion of being a Jedi Knight. Zan has given him a "lightsaber" (a metal pipe painted blue) to hopefully shut him up for a while.

Buddy wears a helmet of unknown make that seems to keep him in a constant state of audiovisual overload in an attempt to drown out the voices. Whether it actually works or not is impossible to tell, but he refuses to remove it under any circumstance. L3-K0 was only able to determine Buddy's species through a genetic scan.

---

If there's not at least one character in a mysterious face-concealing helmet, are you even making Star Wars content? Buddy's backstory was actually surprisingly easy to adapt to this setting. Just instead of "weird multiverse energy broke his mind and made him immortal" it's "The Force broke his mind and made him immortal." (And yeah, there wasn't really a good place up there to throw that detail in, but Buddy is basically immortal.)

I had a couple of ideas to explain the helmet, and it's actually the reason I decided to make him Umbaran. They're pale, extremely sensitive to sunlight, and also tend to be psychic, so I thought maybe he wears the helmet to protect himself from the sun and it helps keep him from constantly the minds of everyone around him since he's a lot more psychic than the average Umbaran.

L3-K0, A.K.A. "Leko," droid. A prototype tactical analysis droid, L3-K0 gained sentience when his developers were unable to find a way to memory-wipe him without also resetting his analytical effectiveness. Reasoning that the best way to improve the droid's capabilities was to allow it to accumulate experience without limits, Leko convinced his creators to allow him to freely travel the galaxy with the goal of simply learning all there is to learn about it.

Throughout his travels, Leko met and recruited several interesting individuals to form a sort of mercenary team and perform various jobs across the galaxy.

-------

So there you have it! If you want the HF links to any of these for whatever reason, here they are:

Tailii

Zan

York

Buddy

Leko

[csleko]

"Hey, look! It's me!"

Because not ALL my OCs can be perfectly recreated with Hero Forge. I've had the idea to try turning my Leko model into a miniature for a while, and it seemed like a good time to give it a go.

Pull in the model, scale to mini size, pose it, add base, delete the rig, re-mesh to combine individual pieces into a single solid model, crank up the detail, hope my computer doesn't crash while regenerating a couple million polygons, decimate polycount to reduce eventual file size without compromising detail, export STL.

Worked without a hitch, except I had scaled Leko down to be about the size of my halfling miniature, and it was immediately clear to me that would have caused structural issues regarding his extremely thin arms and legs. So I scaled him up closer to a regular human size and hoped that would keep the small parts from being too fragile when I printed it.

Oh, I also had to remake his head because the original model is actually hollow, which I had completely forgotten about until the re-mesh completely broke it.

It looked to be printing perfectly fine, but I was still nervous about those limbs. They're thinner than the light supports I use on minis! Hopefully my flexible resin mixture will keep him bendy, and not breaky. Getting those supports off is going to need surgical precision.

WELL, CRAP! Surprisingly, though, the failure point was actually his ankles. After those broke I gave up on trying to save it and just ripped the rest of the supports out without care, which is actually when the arm and leg snapped off.

Luckily, I had the foresight to put an extra on the plate in case of just such a catastrophic failure. I was a lot more careful with this one.

Success! After a few minutes in the curing bucket, his fragile looking limbs are actually quite bendy, and not as brittle as I worried they'd be. I'm not going to put the mini to any harsh durability tests, but he stands up to some reasonably forceful poking, so my fears of Leko being obliterated by an errant dice throw are *somewhat* lessened.

Now that the anxiety part is over, we can get to the fun part. Let's paint this little guy!

I thought the dark metallic base might let me get away with not having to manually paint the more detailed darker pieces (upper limbs, waist, neck, palms,) but it's a little too shiny and not quite as dark I would like. Not that I'm going to complain about having to do more manual painting. Like I said, this is the fun part. It's just that getting good results from laziness is also fun when it works out.

I don't know why, maybe it's just me, but I think most of my painted minis look absolutely horrendous in closeup pictures, even though they look pretty good to my own actual eyes. Like the silver parts in this final paint job look really spotty and messy in the picture, but they're honestly not! It's like my phone camera has some "make painted minis look extra crappy" setting that I can't figure out how to turn off or something. I dunno. I've been looking at getting a decent camera for future video making purposes, so maybe it'll be able to take decent closeups.

ANYWAY, Leko's OC gang is all painted up and ready to kick some multiversal butt!

Leko: "My scans indicate that these creatures have a durable exoskeleton, and some sort of corrosive retaliatory defense mechanism. I would highly advise ranged attacks."

If for whatever reason you want to try printing your own tabletop mini Leko, the STL will be available on my PATREON, and nowhere else! It'll only cost you a single American dollar! Besides the occasional exclusive downloadable stuff like this mini, sometimes you can find higher resolution, non-watermarked, or even alternate versions of stuff I've posted elsewhere!

[csleko]

So yeah. I’m a frickin’ genius.

Between the eyes looking in various directions, and indicating expressions, I was looking at mapping about 30 different sprites per character. 

OR...

I could draw the sprites without eyes, make a separate mesh for each eye that I can change as needed, and only have to map about 7 different sprites per character.

As an added advantage, I can do the glow for Leko’s eyes and not have to make  entire separate sheets for when they change color. Also I could do that thing where the characters are in the dark and only their eyes show up. 

[csleko]

SO I HAD A THOUGHT...

That since I was thinking about doing more Sprite-O-Verse backgrounds with Blender instead of trying to chop things together in Photoshop...

And since alpha mapping is so much more straightforward...

And since I have a decent handle on UV mapping now...

I could theoretically do just about the entire comic in Blender except for the speech bubbles and other text.

Pro:

Characters fit into the scene better because they’re actually physically there and are being lit by the same light setup and effects.

Scaling and rotating the characters would be much cleaner and less harsh on the pixels.

I can compose more interesting shots and angles with the 3D camera and environment instead of having everyone just flat and shot straight on.

Con:

I would have to make ALL the backgrounds in Blender, both new scenes and ones I’ve already used before.

Mapping all the character sprite sheets will be time consuming and tedious, but only needs to be done once. They’re a single polygon apiece, so hardly resource intensive.

Certain effects I like to do with Photoshop might be more difficult or even impossible if I make the panels like this.

I did promise when I rebooted the series that I wouldn’t make any more major stylistic changes, and this would be pretty much a complete overhaul.

[sprite-o-verse]

Episode 39

[csleko]

Gotta keep up with my creative crap. Here’s another @incorrectocquotations thing. Picking the characters for this one was fun. It could’ve worked for a few different pairs. It was almost Zan/Tailii, Tailii/York, or Zan/Leko before I decided on Tailii/Leko.

[sprite-o-verse]

Episode 38

[csleko]

Who would win? A ninja, a robot, a thief, and a gangster? Or one shadowy boi? I might be addicted to @incorrectocquotations

[csleko]

T-T-T-TRIPLE DRAW of @incorrectocquotations bits!

I got bored waiting on myself to redraw the ones I said I was gonna do, so I went through my likes and just did a few.

I guess these three kind of make a story if you think 4th-dimensionally enough.

THEY’RE SUPER SKETCHY AND I COULDN’T DRAW A DECENT CAR IF YOU LITERALLY HAD A GUN TO MY HEAD.

[csleko]

Been a while since I’ve done a bit from @incorrectocquotations, so...surprise.

[csleko]

One of my concerns with switching to Blender for Sprite-O-Verse was the potential difficulty in pulling off some of the effects I like to do in Photoshop.

Turns out the answer is...just keep doing them in Photoshop and put them into Blender the same way I do the sprites. I just need to be more careful about the glow radius going off the edge of the image. You can definitely spot the bit where it cuts off. All I need to do is just dial it back a bit, though.

I added a little color adjustment and glow in Blender, and put an orange point light in the center of the mess of geometry.This whole test scene came out to a whopping, mind boggling, inconceivable...30 tris.