I like the non-AI Nika the most - I feel like using AI for things like that sort of takes away from the charm in a way I can't explain. Gives me flash-era flashbacks maybe?
My goal is to get something that looks simple, but slightly more detailed than the default sprite. I don't the look most AI images have. Way to sophisticated shading is my problem I guess. The images I posed are close to what I want, but still not quite there.
What I really like is the fact that thanks to the 3D model I made, I have 100% control over poses, clothes, expressions and, with enough tinkering, even the shading.
Funnily enough, using AI for those sprites will actualy make my work harder. I will still have to touch up every image I generate and I will have to generate multiples to pick the best one.
However, the shading and detailing is something I'm not capable of doing in pure 3D and 2D is something I really struggle with. I still want the sprites to look relatively simple and "amateurish", but not as amateurish as they are now.
Something that might be worthwhile is to use another engine to make specific shaders for your blender models, then take screenshots of them with the lighting you want. You might be able to skip the engine thing and just do them in blender, but from what I can tell blender's shading graphs are weaker than ex. unity's. Same with the shading, set up a scene in blender or wherever with very specific lighting or different shaders (toon-style shaders maybe?) and just place your models there. Perhaps the easiest thing would be making really strong normal maps for clothes so you simulate folds?
That's one of the problems I have. The model is quite old and also quite bad. The topology, proportions and rigging has to remain a secret, because it could actualy kill the person who might see it.
The biggest problem is my ability to make textures, or the lack of it. While objects like furniture are fine, clothing and skin ended up in a failure all the times, so all the detail you see on the model is actually sculpted and I have a pretty insane setup to make it all work.
I don't mind it that much though. I find enjoyment in navigating all those keyframes, shape keys and mask layers to get it all to work. You can only get so far without learning to make your own textures, which is something I struggle with and will probably never trully get.
I actualy found an old image where I was testing different shading, and I like some of them. The naked body looks fine, but clothing ends up looking like plastic. and that is not going to change without me actualy putting some textures on it. That's what the AI would actually help me with the most. I have no problem with modeling even the slightest of details, but texturing it is completely different matter for me.
I am also horrible at texturing so I can't offer much help there. Perhaps try out Substance Painter
Left is me manually editing some cloth, right is Substance Painter just picking color values depending on the topology. It only took 3 seconds, I just dragged a cloth-texture-mask on the model and changed the colors around. Theres a good bunch of tutorials for it and it might even be less work than the other methods.
23 days ago(+1)
Yeah. My tries are quite comparable to the left hat. I tried substance painter in tha past, but that was almost a decade ago I might give it another go in the future.