✨ON THE BRINK OF ANIMATION✨

I've been hiding this past week, spending all my time finishing "Mark 1" of the Praetorian armor, and working on a secret other project that I can now reveal to you all! The "Mark 1" Praetorian features a mix of light and heavy armor plates, which I've spent a lot of time tweaking to allow for many different variants of Praetorians, and now I am ready to start rigging this first rendition of a Praetorian for animation! I will be adding more details and refining the armor as time goes on, but this marks a HUGE milestone for the production of my animated series, Banner of Souls 😆

In addition to the work I done on the Praetorians, I've also been designing an "Abomination" enemy, and have spent this past weekend re-topologizing its unnatural body. This monster will serve as a good "starter" enemy for animation tests as I continue to develop 2D style VFX to prepare for the main villains in this series and their near endless sorceries.

📦MY FAVORITE ADDONS📦

As I've worked on both of these rigs, I've come across a few really useful addons for blender that you may be interested in! Two revolve around re-topo, and they have saves hours and even days of time, and if you have $5-$70 USD to invest in your projects, I highly recommend buying some or all of these addons for a one time fee.

I am not sponsored by any of these developers, so know that you are getting my honest feedback when I tell you that these addons are incredible!

The first is called QRemeshify: a roughly $5 addon that re-topologizes your entire mesh into quads for you. It works really well for simple to moderately detailed geometry, and I've just started using it to speed up environmental asset creation. I've also tested it a few times with more complex geometry, such as the Abomination I've been working on, and though it does work for most of the mesh, it has a hard time predicting vertex paths in and around joints and spikes, making manual retopology more viable for complex geometry. Still, $5 for an addon that can save you hours of time re-topologizing hundreds of simple to moderately detailed object is an absolute win in my book!

Here is the link to QRemeshify by Ksami: https://ksami.gumroad.com/l/QRemeshify

The next addon is called OkTopo Remesher: a roughly $24 (for single user) addon geared specifically for instantly re-topologizing humanoid character heads with animation ready quality! Heads and faces are one of the hardest parts of a character to re-topologize correctly, and can take hours and even days to get everything right. But this addon does it all for you, reducing the time spent remeshing your character's head to 20 minutes at most! It's an absolutely brilliant addon that I've now used multiple times for both male and female heads without any issue. Highly recommend this one!

Here's the link to OkTopo Remesher by Yegor Kumachov: https://yegorkumachov.gumroad.com/l/oktopo

And lastly, Zen Uv V5.3.3: a roughly $40 (for single user) addon to speed up your UV unwrapping and packing process, with features to quadrify your unwrapped meshes, pack islands without any overlapping, automatically solve unevenly stretched and scaled islands for consistent texture scale, instant island orientation to make your specifically selected UVs face the same direction, and much much more! I've barely scratched the surface with this addon, and it's already exceeded my expectations. So if you hate UV unwrapping as much as I do, and want an addon that streamlines every part of the process for you with just a few clicks of a button, this is the addon for you!

Here's the link to Zen Uv V5.3.3 by Sergey Tyapkin: https://superhivemarket.com/products/zen-uv

😊THANK YOU😊

I want to say thank you all so much for giving me a week to focus fully on the production of Banner of Souls, and for being patient with me as I've been working behind the scenes on several more surprises I have planned for the future. You are such a wonderful audience, and I am so grateful for the amount of support you've shown me these past few years! The animated series is closer than ever now, and I am so thankful to God and to you for allowing me to get this far. We still have more work to do before animation production on the first episode can begin, but we are now on the brink of animation content and tutorials here on the Comfee Mug channel. So buckle up for some brand new content coming soon! And in the meantime, God bless you all, and always remember to stay Comfee 😁