I'm switching frameworks from Gatsby to EmberJS which is a responsive UI framework to get closer to an app and feel and be user friendly whether your on a phone or desktop. There is a lot of work ahead but making a small app with simple features and pushing it out is the best approach to get up and running.

Here is the first character design. Characters will be able to change their gender, clothes, hair, eyebrows, eyes, face expression, color, and more. While the characters will only be 2D images I'm working to minimize the drawing work by 70%. To do that I need to create 3D characters and render the images. The advantages are that I can create different poses and expressions and take different shots.

I'm studying the smile face expression. Everyone has a unique smile that creates wrinkles in certain areas of the face. Not all face expression are equal, there is a variation, and sometimes there are none, but a smile is a smile and it is easily recognized.

Modo's render engine is quick and easy to achieve sss toon look in one frame. Blender is also quick but the frames need to be separated and rendered then layered over each other through blenders composite nodes or another drawing or photo application.

(September, 23/2020 7:18pm) I did a paint over and sketched the hair, eyelashes, eyebrows, and lighting. In Blender I created a hair curve and began tweaking settings and doing test renders in Evee Render Engine.

There are two options for hair strands, strand, and strip. I chose to use strip because it looks great for toon characters and it has a semi-realistic look. Strand will render rounded hair follicles while strip will render flat strips similar to long ribbons. Add some translucency by ramping up the sub surface scattering in the principled shader settings and you get hair!.

December 01/2020 @10:39pm

Just a small update. Still working on this character, I've been busy with school and coding. Had to move the arms up into the T-pose for rigging. There is an issue with the hair force field. When two force fields are present they override each other causing the hair to pull in different directions. I know there's a better way to go about this but that's what this type of work involves. Solving problems.

December 10/2020 @9:03am

Moving on to polygon hair mesh. The avatar will be used as a base character. Realistic hair is best used for film. I will experiment more on realistic hair in another post. I decided to use PHP for the backend and minimize the avatar clothing options to get things going. That means a lot more drawing and coding.

January 26/2021 @12:39am

It's been a while.

January 27/2021 @6:51pm

one step closer

February 12, 2021 @12:44am

Just happy to see that it's coming together.

February 13, 2021 @12:08pm

Stay Warm.

February 14, 2021 @2:20am

Happy Valentines Day!

February 19, 2021 @4:51pm

Shoe design.

Changed the shoe design to a school shoe. Still needs some work.

February 27, 2021 @1:30pm

She is tall.

March 7, 2021 @4:10am

April 1, 2021 @10:20am

Is it a joke?....haha

April 6, 2021 @11:37am

April 8, 2021 @1:35pm

smart girl.

April 21, 2021 @7:56am

Render work. I have to move the camera and set up the lights in the scene, then take many shots and bring it all together. Shading, rendering, and compositing is a whole process in itself. These are broken up into 'departments' in animation studios.

There is some subtle changes in the teeth. These small changes occur throughout the process.

Rendered using Evee. I will do some renders using Cycles but Evee is much faster. Lot's of unwrapping. The boring stuff. It's much more fun painting directly on the model.

For the hair I just drew it on the Ipad pro then applied it to polygon strips. Faster when rendering as opposed to rendering hair using blenders hair system.

May 05, 2021 @1:40pm

https://chewboba.com has a new user interface! I will post updates on the blog at https://chewboba.com/web/blog

July 24, 2021 @11:36am

This is the tour guide named Yue. It is the complete avatar I have created during development. You can now try avatar outfits on the website without registering.

August 21, 2021 @8:32am

hands and feet are complex to design.

August 27, 2021 @12:19AM