Originally, I just had the character posed, but I really wanted to show off the character’s weight painting! Some unseen aspects that I’ve included for in-engine gameplay is the rigging for her hair and skirt. I intended for this piece to eventually be a playable character, and since she belongs in the Wind Waker world I made sure to rig/skin her to account for generated wind effects. For example, her buns as well as her bangs are rigged to be able to move around; her skirt petals are also individually rigged to achieve an engaging squash and stretch effect for some of the animations I have in mind for her as a future project. In the meantime, please enjoy this cute idle!

Another aspect I haven’t specifically displayed in these 3D views are the varying facials I made for Farore, much like Link’s faces in Wind Waker. I’ve always wanted to learn how exactly they were created, so I did an in-depth study of the types of eye/eyebrow/mouth combinations could create such a vast amount of facial expressions. Below is an example of what I created for the eyes. The pupils are actually masked by the eyelid which allows for them to appear as though they are looking around simply by translating its location in UV space; as a result, the eyes are placed on a piece of topology close to the surface of the character’s head rather than textured directly on the mesh.

I look forward to posting some more animations of the character here soon as I keep learning the new software! It has an amazing UI and tool-set I’ve never seen in a skinning/animation software, and I definitely recommend it to artists who normally feel overwhelmed by other software’s sheer number of tools or confusing UI layout. I can’t even begin to express how helpful this will be in my rigging/skinning pipeline from here on out. Between the ability to adjust the rig without mucking up any of the weight painting and easily copying/pasting skin weights, Akeytsu is everything I’ve ever wanted in a software specifically tailored for the animation pipeline. While I still find it easier to make my initial rig in Maya, I am beyond happy to have found a software where my locked skin weights haven’t randomly glitched out and shifted around just by opening the project.