Hello everyone! I hope you’re all enjoying the new year so far. I’d also like to wish a happy Lunar New Year to everyone celebrating it!

For me, the start of this year has been a bit rough, but it’s not without some positive highlights. One of those is a major change I’ve made to my approach for character modeling. Now I definetly realized that my previous method was taking way too much time, so I decided to rethink and optimize the process significantly.

As you can see from the render, I’ve opted for a different art style, more stylized, with hand-drawn textures. While this style may not look as realistic or detailed as the previous one, the advantages are simply too good to ignore.

Some of them being:

The models have half the polycount of the previous ones.

The workflow is much faster.

Rigging is easier, allowing for more expressive facial animations.

Hair modeling is significantly quicker.

The hair shader is highly flexible and user-friendly.

Overall, this new approach has drastically improved the speed of character creation. I really hope you like this new style as much as I do because I think I’ve finally found my artistic style! To give you some perspective, it only took me about 5 hours to create these three hairstyles. For those who forgot, the last Ren model’s hairstyle took me 20 hours.

Looking back and doing some reserch, some things became clear. The previous models were fine if I wanted to work on something small and simple. However, considering the scope of Lycoris—with its numerous characters and environments, a single person just isn’t enough to manage that complexity using such detailed style. That’s why I’ve decided to start Lycoris production with this new style.

For those wondering, "Didn’t it take you more than a month to make these?", the answer is yes, but for good reason. When creating something, you don’t just come up with the perfect solution in an instant. It’s a process of experimentation and repetition until you’re satisfied with the result. For example, it took me two weeks just to come up with the hair shader.

Anyway, that’s all for today. Thank you all for your patience and support, I truly appreciate it! I wouldn’t have made this kind of progress in 3D modeling without you guys.

Now that my vacation has started, I’m going to dive in and start creating the rest of the characters like a madman. Bye!