I am currently prototyping a visual novel built with Bevy and Rust. I needed cover art and things for my game, however, that meant I had to draw them myself or pay someone else to do that.

And I was not in a position to spend money on this thing, since it was uncertain whether this will succeed.

And then my game should have character models in its dialogs like in Hatsune Miku: Colorful Stage.

Initially, I was thinking of going with Inochi2d, since my game was planned to be in Rust, through the currently being developed Inox2d implementation, and to generate the characters, for now, with Mannequin.

But who says I have to go with 2D? It turns out that going 3D is even easier.

Enter VRoid

I remembered that there was a news that says about VRoid, a software from Pixiv, a Japanese tech company that is the operator of the art-sharing site Pixiv.

The best thing about it is that it's free to use, and it's CC0! Public domain!

So I started making the characters that are going to be used in the game. Just rough sketches, and maybe if this worked out and we got a publisher with funding, we can try to make the character designs less VRoid and more unique.

These characters are not an indication of the story part of the game prototypes. They're just placeholder names, and all for now.

For Lala, I want her to be a very cute girl that loves pink aesthetics. So this will be tied to her appearance and clothing. Her hair is pink and she has ponytails!!! ^_^

For Yukinai. PLEASE FORGIVE ME if there aren't any meanings to the name, I accidentally wrote that name somehow, and I haven't figured out another name for them.

I was so inspired by Project Sekai's way of portraying Mizuki Akiyama in "And Now, the Ribbon is Tied" story event.

It portrays Mizuki in a very cute and adorable way. Just look at their adorable bedroom and their very adorable face!

It's great that VRoid is pretty flexible with gender in its "Fem" template. I made Yukinai with feminine eyelashes, and an androgynous hairstyle like Mizuki's, however, the current design still looks masculine unfortunately. I plan to use Yukinai for some Jungian or Siegmund Freud lore things in the game.

For Rana, I was inspired by Sayaka Saeki from Bloom Into You!

Blender Background

After the characters are done, it's time to import them to Blender and animate them! That way, we could get the 3D art we want.

But we haven't even got the background.

I found Polyhaven, a site that has many realistic HDRs, textures, and models. It was quite fun making the scene!

I also had some problems when making the scene in Blender. This was my first time so.

I first couldn't find a good way to tile the texture of the grass and the picnic mat, so I just duplicated it in Blender's Eevee renderer, and it turned out fine!

I also found issues with scaling things. The height and width aren't displayed in an obvious place for a beginner for me, so I had to think around things.

I switched the renderer to Cycles, the production renderer, and rendered the image.

However, there's a problem with this. The Cycles renderer has very good graphics, that, IT DISPLAYS SHADOWS in the PLANES!!

So our hack just now had to be removed. I looked for solutions for tiled textures. That needs me to edit the nodes of the textures. After tens of minutes spent fixing things. I got myself the final result!

Now, the characters haven't been loaded into the scene. That should be for another post.

But it's so great that Cycles is so PHOTOREALISTIC. This feels just like a picture taken from a GoPro or something.

Oh, and is it time to buy a laptop with discrete GPUs? Cycles... it takes so long to render things with CPU...

I'm not sure if this is because of a broken config or something, but my estimated compilation render time was around 9 hours for the last one. It was fortunate that I could save the output after I aborted the render process. It should look photorealistic enough.

Also, bye!!