"Hey, quit dozing off. I heard one of the captains is making the rounds tonight."

"So? It's been pretty uneventful this past week. Iris doesn't mind."

"It's not just Iris out tonight... Whatever, your funeral."

Whoa, new character be upon yee. Her name is Bee (not sold on the spelling or the name yet.) She is one of a few guard captains of this demonic palace. Unlike Iris, she is more hands on with her training and discipline. The bane of lazy or tired guards, she is the most annoying and persistent of the captains, usually ambushing them when they least expect it.

So for a technical breakdown, this I think she middle of the road in terms of performance of all my characters. 134k verts/133k faces isn't that bad tbh. Render performance on her own is about 4-7 seconds depending on how much light is on her. I planned to do a lot more with her textures, mainly scars and what not, but after spending too much time on getting everything to play nice with the model and rig itself, I figured it's just best to get her out and moving.

Her armor is the most under-performant thing I think I've made in a while. I wanted to add detail without having to setup UVs >> Texture >> Shaders and ended up going with a method to transfer normals from the breastplate to the skulls when they overlapped. There is the modifier way, which is just a data transfer node, and shrinkwrap, but I tried using geometry nodes this time, specifically following the merging objects tutorial from Joey Carlino (i'd link it but then there would be a massive youtube vid thats not mine and thats not cool) (if this somehow makes it back to you Joey, hey i like your stuff, sorry you have to see my smut.)

However, the biggest thing with this project is Bee's prosthetic. Every part of her hand was made separate from her model and I had to fiddle with her other hand to get the rig to play nice. The other big thing that still needs to be addressed is who she's related too. For those who have seen my older stuff, Bee is Ceres' older sister. Bee was also supposed to be released alongside her boyfriend (and a touched up version for Ceres), but when I went to open this project back up, I apparently had Bee fully retopologized, and well... the boyfriend is missing a face still. I wanted a lot more done but recovering from two surgeries has been a lot, along side the prospects of moving out. I can happily say I am on the tail end of recovery finally, only a few more PT visits left before its all at home stuff and tbh I'm ready to put rubber to the road with these characters.

As for the next project, expect an update around Wednesday and something finished by Friday.

I've also included the sculpt previews as I don't think that's been anything I've ever shown off. I want to have sculpting timelapses and or possibly streams in the near future, but don't want to bloat my limited drive space.