​New visual style: anime is dead - for the last time

New visual style: anime is dead - for the last time

Hey everyone! I finally came to tell you what I’ve been working on lately.
You know, while I was busy building all the systems, fiddling with the interfaces and everything else, one thought just wouldn’t leave me:

I hate Ami’s model.

I can’t stand the style, and her rig annoys the hell out of me.
Yeah, originally everything was made for anime shading, but since I decided not to go with that — why the hell am I still using a model specifically made for that shading?
Sure, I reworked it a bit so it would function with regular lighting, but in the end, this is not at all what I actually wanted!
And you know what’s the dumbest part? It’s the face. It just doesn’t work with classic facial animation at all!
More precisely, it’s way too limited. It’s really hard to create any emotion without ruining the appearance. That just doesn’t cut it.

So, even though I hate doing it — I redid everything.
Absolutely.
Completely new visual style, new topology, textures, rig, morphs.
For some specific visual improvements, I increased the mesh density in places by about 20-25%, but considering there are only two characters on screen during combat (for now) — it’s not a big deal. Later I’ll add LODs to simplify the models at a distance from the camera — but that’s for later. Maybe I will increase density even more, if I will find that it is not enough somewhere.
Other characters will have the same style ofc.
The transition was radical, but overall, I’m more than satisfied, even though it took me over two weeks.

Let me know what you think of the new style — my eyes are a bit burned out from staring at it for so long. Im preparing a few videos with facial animation demos and something else related to the new model!

Feel free to ignore the hair for now- I’ve put that part on hold, and the hairstyle will be changed as well.