Robotrio Behind the Scenes: Ace McNacho in 3D, Part 2

When I last left off, Ace didn't look bad, but there were a couple of issues.

First off, at this point the color scheme felt extremely desaturated (see left), despite my choosing the exact colors--to the pixel--of the non-shadowed areas in Ace's character reference sheet. I consulted Leena about it, and it turned out that 2D Ace's darker colors were more saturated than his lighter colors, which helped the 2D image "pop" more. Sure enough, once I darkened and saturated Ace's coat to something of a mix between the two values, it looked much closer to Ace.

Another issue was the lighting; the "window" was set up to emit light, but it was emitting a remarkably small amount of it--enough so that the fake lighting of the bottom-right corner was brighter than its "source." With that said, this was a pretty easy fix, and scaling the scene down to be closer to Ace's canon height forced me to redo the lighting anyway.

The biggest change was the decision to redo Ace's head; the first one more closely resembled a human skull, but it didn't convey Ace's facial structure for me, and the side of the head was a bit of a mess. I decided to start by using real-life clay to get the basic shape down before going into Blender; despite a lower poly count (to be increased by later adding more polys to the "mouth"), I felt this one was a vast improvement.

There were a couple of other differences between the two models; despite the advantages of Ace's coat using an actual simulation, there was enough clipping that it felt more reliable to rig the coat the old-fashioned way (using extra bones on his sleeves and coat sides to simulate gravity as best I could). The current mouth is done through an invisible cylinder and the cookie cutter-like boolean modifier; modifying that is far easier for me than simply building a mouth onto the model. It took some looking into how mouth muscles work (after all my time on Blender, one thing I've never attempted before is potential speech), but I eventually got it down:

 I'm also happy to add a second image I did for Ace's official tie-in blog! I've included my first version, but I've since fixed an issue with his eyes' shading (it turned out there were some extra polys attached to the inside of his eye, for whatever reason) and switched the mouth's boolean style for a more precise and artifact-free version. After throwing on a subsurface modifier to round out Ace's face and sticking the old "ear" back on in Gimp--the new one actually looked worse--I believe I'm done!

Since this was a one-off image, I had actually rotated the room significantly to fit with the pose. Of course, since Robotrio canonically takes place in 2011, Ace's profile picture also wouldn't look that clear if taken on a smart phone, which means... he took that with an actual camera. Anyway, this was a really exciting project, and I can't wait to show more!