Making Your First Model Part 26
Creating Toons and Spheres

Alright! Let’s get started!

Before we get started . . . Let’s make all of Camila’s hair the same color! I was racing through, thinking I’d cover her hair up with textures . . . But that worked out poorly.

So, I’m going to open two copies of Camila and steal the settings from one hair material to use for all hair materials. I just copy and pasted the RGB values, so that’s not worthy of a screenshot!

Making Toons . . .

So, we’re going to start off with toons because they’re the most mindless to create. We just need to find a good reference of Camila with clear shadows and then paintbucket those shadows into the bottom rectangle.

Now, this brings up a question I’ve wrestled with quite a bit – do we leave the top white or do we add color? My middle name is Avant-Garde. I’m always tempted to do things against the grain. But for this? I’m listening to my model inspiration, Michi-K. Just leave the top white.

For the reference, I’ll use the same reference I used for making Camila’s face. Let’s open that and a default toon up in SAI. Why not Photoshop? SAI feels more lightweight, and we don’t really need anything fancy. Why not MS Paint? You can’t eyedrop from one image to another!

I struggled with this choice, but I am in fact using a toon that comes packaged with PMXe as opposed to a toon made by another modeler. I don’t know what benefit comes from larger files, so I’ll just stick to smaller files.

To make this easier, I did a little “extra”.

I selected a rectangle and made a new layer. I colored that layer in, and then made a clipping layer above it. That means that I can just swipe my mouse across the top layer and not worry about any bleeding through to the level above it. This would be extremely useful if you were going for a gradient effect as you’d just be able to color over it with a new color. The opacity of the layer below the clipping layer would determine the opacity of the clipping layer!

From there, I switched over to the Camila reference image and chose the darkest color of her dress. Switched to the toon and colored that in.

And, from there I just repeat the process for every other material.

You might notice that I didn’t do what I set out to do . . . I staggered the height of several dark rectangles just because I had a gut feeling it would work out.

Now, all there is to do on this front is to apply them all and see how it works out.

Oh no! We’re on the first toon and we already have a problem! She looks silly! I thought that, perchance, the dark rectangle was too small. That wasn’t the issue – the issue is that the color is, for one, too deep. The second issue is just that this face wasn’t particularly made for cell shading. For now, let’s just nix the face toon and add the rest.

. . .

I was wrong!! The toons look awesome in MMD!

What doesn’t look particularly awesome is the chance of getting trashed for turning a Latina into a polar bear in a snowstorm! (See: Ruby) The way to fix this is just to make her face less shiny and white and more human and . . . not white.

All joking aside, Camila is extremely pale in her reference images and PMXe is kind of bad at showing what the model will look like in MMD. If I match her skin tone perfectly in PMXe, then she’ll be a glowing mess in MMD.

. . .

Now wait a minute! I know what Camila’s base skin tone is on the reference image and I have no idea how to make it using the materials . . . What if . . . I just take her UV maps for her skin . . . and . . . paintbucket them with the correct skin tone!

Now, I want everyone to remember this . . .

When all else fails, Steal settings from Michi-K.

I just made a solid image with Camila’s base skin tone and loaded it as the texture. Then, I just copied Michi-K’s Rin model’s settings for the skin material and . . . Bam! Her skin looks pretty good if I do say so myself!

As you can see, the skin is nearly spot on! I could try making it more spot on, but we need to get rolling! Right away, I can see some problems I need to fix with the materials to make them fit the model better. (Those pearls, am I right?) After I touch those up . . . It’s sphere time!

Now for the Spheres!

We’ve gotten Camila all pretty and dolled up!

Camila with toons and proper materials

Now, I can point out one big problem right off the bat – her dress is way too shiny. While that’s easy to fix with a simple modification to either the spectral color or the reflection value. . . I think it’s so cute the way it is!

Now, let’s talk about one of the strangest things I found that shook my understanding of spheres.

That’s a sphere! It’s not the right shape! It’s not spherical! It’s .  .  . Strange.

We’re actually going to ignore that sphere’s existence from this point forward . . . But I was just so in awe at the non-conformity that I had to show you guys.

So, let’s go down the line making spheres! This will be a lot harder than making toons and requires popping open Photoshop. Just like textures, these might end up being hot messes that we toss in the trash.

So, let’s start with skin. Since we already have the skin to a perfect color . . . we need to work in grey-scale to not bork it up.

Let’s open one of Bandage’s sphere files to have a good idea of where the actual sphere is and what resolution to use.

To find some base images, I turned to Google Images. To be paranoid, I set the usage filter to “Reuse with Modification”. It’s up to you to make sure you’re covering your bases when it comes to copyright  . . . But honestly, if you don’t out yourself the way I am, no one will ever know you used whatever image originally if you’re going to modify it to heck and back for a sphere.

For her skin, I grabbed this screenshot of an image:

First, of course, we need to make it grey-scale. I added an “Emboss” filter and moved it around to get rid of the most bumpy parts.

Next, I’m going to add a vignette above it, then play with the levels so that it doesn’t shine too much.

As a note, I actually turned off my monitor so that it would switch over to my laptop screen. While it was fixed, the people who fixed it borked it up even further. So it’s extremely bright and washed out . . . But that allowed me to lower the brightness of the sphere until it wasn’t a shiny mess. This is a tidbit that only someone in my extremely specific situation would find useful – switching over from a giant TV to a tiny laptop screen will mess with the PMX view window and you won’t be able to find the model until you switch back to the TV.

So, the first Camila has no sphere. The second Camila has a sphere that I thought looked as dark as it could go on my monitor. The third is Camila with a sphere that was as black as it could go without being solid black on my laptop screen. I’m extremely torn on which looks better. The last sphere and the lack of sphere look nearly identical .  . . but I love shiny things so much!

The simple answer on what to do is just to not sanitize your sphere folder and include all versions of the spheres. Give the user choice!

Is that the right idea? Not really. If you’re making a model, you’re somehow expected to know what the best choices are for everything. Why else would people lock their models? But we’re not like that. We say “Yo! I’m human and I don’t know what looks good.”

Let’s skip on down and try to make a hair sphere in a similar way. As a note, the hair sphere should probably be able to get away with being way lighter, as the hair is dark to begin with.

I got the hair texture from here! It was really nice, and CC0!

And . . . Here’s a strange lesson for ya. Toons override spheres in PMXe.

Does it work like this in MMD also?

Yes, but to a much less obnoxious degree. Yay!! I was worried! But this sphere still needs a little love. Perhaps a bit of Gaussian blur?

After changing a few material settings . . . Here she is with hair spheres applied to all of her hair! And wowzer! I love it! 

Now, all you have to do is either repeat the same process over and over again . . . Or just say “eeeh, spheres seem like a lot of work and it looks fine with just toons!”

Two Hours Later . . .

I’ve added spheres to every material! They probably didn’t need spheres, but I added them! Things look different in PMXe and MMD, so I’m a little worried about how it will turn out . . . Here goes nothing . . .

It can suffice to say, I am extremely happy.

Well, folks, this is the end of the road. We’ve made a model . . . We had our ups, our downs, and our hiding under the desk in frustrations . . . But we did it!

Tune in next time when we prepare our little Camila to go out into the world!