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Cerise

6 years ago772 words

Here's a 3D model that I've made, and an explanation of why I've made it!

My current goal at the moment is to making Taming Dreams as a 3D 'characters talking' thing which makes perfect sense and appeals to me, but which I wouldn't expect other people to be particularly interested in just yet because I've probably not adequately shown exactly how it's going to work.

It's been taking a while though because I'm not entirely sure how it'll work myself! I have a general idea of the kind of thing I want to do, but I've been uncertain about the specifics of the execution, especially in terms of the look of the characters.

So I've been playing around with 3D modelling stuff trying to settle on a style that I find both appealing and easy enough to work with, such that adding new characters and scenes and such wouldn't be too challenging or time-consuming.

Since I'm still in this state of uncertainty, it seemed unwise to dive straight into making characters who'll actually appear in the final thing; it seemed better to experiment with some others who probably won't appear. That way, I can experiment and make mistakes with them so then I've got a clearer idea of how to go about it when it comes to making the characters I'll actually use.



Cerise is a character from Miasmon, which I worked on literally one billion years ago and - to the shock of everyone - never finished. It was inspired directly by Pokemon, so I wanted its protagonists to have some connection to the Pokemon formula. Cerise and Zaffre (the guy) are both named after colours: shades of ∞ red ∞ (or pink, which is technically a shade of red) and ∞ blue ∞ respectively.

They looked like this way back in 2012:



I returned (sort of) to Miasmon to in 2014, where Cerise looked like this:



That was after coming up with the Alora Fane lore, and making her into a Meek (hence the deer ears). It's still one of my favourite drawings, despite being years old at this point. Sort of annoying, that.

Anyway, I decided on a whim to use these characters to play around with a visual style for Taming Dreams, and, long story short, here's the result, which you've probably already seen because it's the preview image:



(She's not a Meek here just because I felt it'd be more valuable to experiment with a human model.)

And here are some additional images, just because I like looking at these sorts of things myself so I might as well share:









I'm really happy with how it turned out! I feel that I'm definitely getting better at this, and that this is my best model yet. It's exactly the sort of style I was hoping for and imagining, but which I doubted I'd be able to actually execute. So I'll be quite happy to create the Taming Dreams characters in this style. It was also personally interesting to redesign this old character a bit to have an outfit that was less, well, stupid.

The only issue is that it took ages - like almost three days of focused effort - but that's largely because I was doing a lot of experimentation and figuring things out during the process. I imagine that the speed would improve with each new one, plus I'll be able to derive a base model from this that I'll be able to use for other characters to dramatically speed up the process.



I'm working on a Zaffre model too. It should be finished today - I've just got some final touches to do - so I'll likely post about that tomorrow.

After that, I'll set up a simple conversation between them, either using dialogue from the original Miasmon, or something new, to show you what I have in mind for Taming Dreams. I've been playing around with that, and I think it might be best to release them as videos as well as (or perhaps instead of) the interactive browser-based thing I was planning. Videos are far, far easier to access and share, after all. I'll talk more about that - and some potential barriers that are very much on my mind - once I've got a demo, which shouldn't take too long once the models are made.