New Year, New Tatsu! (image) (Patreon)

Happy new year everyone! I've been working on some future stuff including new characters, new backgrounds, and future animations! And while the next animation and characters are not ready to be shown yet, I wanted to show the progress I've made on Tatsu's rig, model and shader, which will apply to some of the future characters as well, so apologies in advance for the technicalities!

I've been testing new workflows and stylization methods recently, and one of them was this sort of sketch-style where the "line-art" and construction lines are showing on the model as if it were a 2d drawing! My goal is to eventually reach a point where I can have a hybrid 2d-3d art style to push the stylization as far as I can, but it will be quite complicated to animate with these new features so I might only keep that specific style for specfic animations and renders.

I also changed the shader so that it supports even more customization (and stylization) features like custom screen-space highlights, fresnel effects, multi-layered screen-space patterns, colored AO, shadows, and a lot more smaller stuff, all in an effort to push the stylization further.

I also added and polished a handful of new blendshapes and controllers to Tatsu which will allow their range of expression to be even greater & more expressive and made new corrective blendshapes for their limbs so that they deform a little less when bending!

In the end I was so excited about these new improvements that I had to make a demonstration sheet showing the new changes and additions to the rig! But although I am very happy with the progress, there is still a lot of potential for future improvements and additions, so I will be working and tinkering on those on the side while working on other stuff.

I hope you like it!

(and an extra video of a turntable of the model and shader is available in the attached files!)