Developing New Skills

For whatever reason, I just can’t wrap my head around 2D pixel sprites. It’s just not something my brain feels very equipped to learn. A large part of it is animation. I understand animating pixel sprites in theory. I have made a few myself. It is… the kind of tedious that drives my brain to madness. I’ve tried! I just can’t do it!

So once again I circle back around to the other graphical format. No, not 2D vector art, though I do highly respect it, it is not my vibe at all. No, the type of graphics I think I could be good at and wrap my head around is good ol’ 3D modeling. Specifically low-poly 3D. My first video game was Mega Man Legends, I have a soft spot for the low-poly PS1 3D aesthetic. Added benefit is that animations are keyframed on a skeleton, not stored with an individual sprite for every single frame of animation. That is something that sounds significantly more in line with how my brain works.

The obvious problems are that the tools for making 3D models are complex and even with the best tutorials you need to be stubborn to get through to making things like characters. I also understand that rigging is an extremely tedious process, but it sounds like most of that is in weight painting (significantly lessened for low-poly) and face rigging (probably not going to be relevant for me since I think I’m going to do classic sprite faces).

Anyways I am going to try to make this my project for August (and maybe September). Make and rig and texture One 3D model. We’ll see how long it takes. Inevitably future models will take less time, but I really want to see this happen if possible.