First important thing to note is that I used similar lighting conditions that I used almost two years ago, which is basically just a sun light source. But the type of sun lighting I use today is much different than what I used back then, as the sun has a warm tint to it, which wasn’t present in my renders of the past, and is why the more recent render looks like the coat color is completely different, when in reality it’s mostly the same, just in slightly different lighting conditions.

… But anyway! About last year I showed my progress by comparing a still frame from my Coloratura Idle animation with a very early WIP Coloratura model. Now, this time, I wanted to recreate some poses I did a while ago and see how they’d come out today! And these are the results! The differences should speak for themselves… But I’m going to talk about them anyway, and in detail.

The most obvious change that drew my attention first (other than I guess the clothes now being present) was the precense of now well defined cheeks! There were tons of things I neglected to do back in the day just simply do to my ineptness. I completely botched the cheeks the first time through. As a result, a few things were very wrong. The old render is lacking any clear separation from the neck and head. It’s oddly smooth for no real good reason. And since there are no cheeks, there are no cheeks to compress and push out for a smile, making the facial expression for the mouth in particular to feel flat.

And now the eyes… Boy. There were some very clear issues there as well. One thing I am extremely glad I did was move the eyes much, much closer together by default. They were so far apart before that the expressions can look very bug-eyed, especiall in front view renders. And when I worked on cheek deformation, I was able to get genuine interaction with the cheeks and eyes, instead of doing it in a very fake way like I did in the past. Clearly the old render has a very clear disconnect with the mouth and bottom of the eyes, while the new render there’s clear interaction there just because of the cheeks! I also had time to refine the eyelashes a bit more, as back then they didn’t feel as well attached as they do now (though they could still use improvement now potentially, but I’m not too sure how to do that if I were to stick with show accurate eyelashes). I also plan to now always have the eyebrows visible at all times, instead of when they are needed like the show does. Trying to get that kind of system working in 3D animation, where the eyebrows dissappear and reappear on a whim, isn’t really easy to do well fluidly. And since the brows look quite nice now too in a neutral expression, I see no reason to not have them there.

Ears! I have no idea what was going on with those old ears, honestly. The shape of them were very off and looked kind of edgy. Was a bit strange. I have reworked the ears more than once, and what we have today is the third version of the ears, which are heavily based off of the style of ears as seen in the MLP Movie. I know some people have some problems with the style of the movie, but the main reason I did it was because I seriously could not make sense of how the TV Show style could ever work properly in 3D. Like, how would ear folding work in 3D with show style. I could never make it work because of how large the base of the ears were for show style, and it made it hard to fold the ears backwards for example. It’s easy to not even notice stuff like this on a 2D drawing, and it’s easy to cheat it there too, intentional or not. But in 3D, it would cause tons of issues with proper deformation of the ears, especially when folding back. How would the base of the ears rotate if the base was so large and wide? I couldn’t work that out, and I had to change them to a style that made more sense to me in three-dimensions, the Movie style ears! Perhaps they could still use a little work… not too sure what yet. I know they might be a bit big at the moment, and I might shrink them down again… we’ll see. But other than that, I’m not too sure what else I can do while retaining the more flexible nature these ears have.

The hair is probably the most taxxing part of the new models. And you can see why, as they are no longer solid mesh blops! It’s still not using real hair particles, though. The new hair is a bit cheated. I’ve explained this when I first introduced it when I was working on my Pinkie Pie model, but basically, the hair I use are still texture meshes. However, there are multiple layers of meshes that all have textures applied where long sections of it are transparnent, and others are not, which immitate the look of hair without it actually being hair. If you look closely, and know where to look, I’m sure you’ll notice the layers. I still use meshes today because they are still just as easy to rig and animate manually, which is what I prefer to do with these cartoony mane styles. Using real hair particles is an absolute pain, and I don’t see myself using them anytime soon for many reasons. Hard to comb and style, hard to animate both manually in combination with hair simulation, and coloring the hair is more limited than applying a texture to a mesh. Also, it’s really hard to see the darker violet stripes in the old render. I had trouble getting them to show properly when tinkering with the Material settings. But with the hair effect now in place, they naturally show a lot more easily. On a side note, most of the mane has been completely replaced at this point, except for the three twirly bits on the ends. But there is one thing on this model that is basically the only thing so far that has never really changed at all, and that’s the tail! Even though the hair effect is applied to it now, the shape and color textures that are used on it have not changed. It’s probably the best thing I made back in the day that didn’t actually look like crap LOL. But yeah, the shape of the mane has been adjusted quite a bit. I think after all this time I have a better understanding of what I need to do to make something look good in 3D from as many angles as possible (This doesn’t just apply to the mane, but the entire model itself). The neck mane in particular (if you can’t see it here, try looking at the other recreated render), you’ll see how much more the neck mane pops out. I remember being reluctant to push it out more. It’s hard to remember why, but having it pushed out more just makes Coloratura feel more complete.

The last major thing of note that changed is the body itself. It’s not as obvious as all the other changes for the most part, but the easiest way to tell the difference is in the front legs and chest. Before, the “arms” sort of was just welded to the chest, while now there is a clear separation of where the “arm” and chest, allowing the front legs to be much more flexible, and generally look a lot better in any case. Changes like this have also been made to the hind legs, though time will tell if those still need improvement or not. Before, the hind legs were absolutely terrible at allowing the model to sit down. The knees could never really bend far enough to allow the legs to stick out and bend past the hips. I don’t think it does this well even today, probably because I still don’t know if I fully understand the anatomy on how the legs fold when quadrupeds sit, but they still have more potential to be flexible just in general.

Other Recreated Render:

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So that’s pretty much all of the major things out of the way. What do you guys think of the progress?