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pineappletree

Beware Falling Fruit !
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ExxageratedRumors by pineappletree

Nothing too detailed today, but a looong overdue update to let all of you still waiting know:

Both Liara and the "Photoprapher" are very much alive!

Progress on project "Nu Liara" might be glacially slow, but there is progress.
(Mesh & UVs done bar some tweaks, advanced rig prototype built, Textures in early stages -
currently painting completely new diffuses, upgrading the original 2x1024² to 4x4096²)

I can't tell you how much longer this is going to take.
But I can tell you I'm determined to bring the project to completion, step by little step.

Hope to see you all at the end of the tunnel.
Greetings from Pineapple Isle!

Shoutout to SeanCF for setting the bait that finally brought me out of my lair ;)

(Picture above is a quick edit of an old "Noir Liara" test scene I never quite got to work,
not least because of problems I hope to alleviate with Nu Liara.)
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Hey guys!


Have been a bit silent in the past weeks so I thought I'd write an update lest anyone starts to think I vanished (again).

Life, to put it simply, kept me quite busy and I barely got to work on the Photographer series - hence the silence.

And I do have to admit, there's also a certain white bearded fellow and his jolly band of magic and sword wielding friends sucking up my free time in what I can't help but regard as the biggest bestest sorceress love triangle simulator masterpiece of the (PC / SP) RPG genre since Baldur's Gate II.

That said however, I'm once again back on the project. Meaning I started to "sketch out" a few new scenes but there's also something else:

Liara NM 360HeadRotate II 0246 by pineappletree
Yes, it's Liara (surprise!).
But then it's not, or rather not the one you know, because this is a completely new model I started to build.

If you ever read the fartoomuchwords I put under the Photographer pieces, you might have seen me complaining about Liara's game model, about missing details, bad deformations, etc. I tried to remedy those problems by retopologizing and reweighting the mesh in the past, but I got to a point where it became just too messy and inefficient to continue that way.

And so I decided to make a new model for Liara from scratch, one no longer bound by the restrictions of last gen gaming consoles, following the flows of human (more or less in this case) anatomy instead and also including a new skeleton and a proper animation rig this time, so I won't have to move every bloody bone in her body by itself anymore (and hopefully won't have to spend as much time retouching "crushed" geometry either).

So far the mesh is coming along nicely at a steady pace, weigthing / rigging and re-applying (eventually replacing?) the textures however I expect will be a slow and painful process.

But I hope you'll stick around none the less for what should ultimately get us even better, more detailed, more natural, more diverse additions to the the Photographer project. Not to forget the new body model should provide a solid base for other characters as well. (Yes, I know I keep dangling that carrot in front of you, but it's really one of those "I whish the day had 36 hours so I could get to work on all of these ideas" kind of things for me.)

Depending on personal schedule and speed of progress, I might also take more "photographies" of the old model in the meantime, so the wait won't be too long.
Well, relatively speaking. You know me... =P (Razz)

To close this off, here are a few more pictures. Obviously all WiP, but I'd love to read your feedback should anything about the model (or mesh) feel odd to you. Also, please tell me whether you'd like to see more of these "behind the scenes" shots as the project progresses!

New left, old right (both meshes subdivided).
Liara NM 360HeadRotate II Comparison 0022 by pineappletree
Liara NM 360HeadRotate II Comparison 0184 by pineappletree

Full model as far as I got it. Thumbs only because NSFW because asari boobies.
New left (subdivided), old as I last used it in the middle (subdivided, left arm hidden, messy mesh - I know), old as originally imported from ME3 to the right (not subdivided because the triangulation causes too many bad artifacts).
 
Random trivia of the day: At this point Liara's new model still has less polys than the eye lashes I built for her a while ago (~8100 and ~8500 respectively)
Random thought of the day: If saying "asari boobies" doesn't immideately make you feel at least a little bit happier, you're emotionaly frozen and need to get your well proportioned behind out into the sun ASAP...

Have a n.i.c.e. day my friends!
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