CAP 3D Modeling Project

Its time that I do something! I took the Caribolt REnders that QxC4eva did and recolored them with the shiny palette of it from the spriting forum from Magistrum. That's what I can do. If you have any feedback, please give me. I used Piskel, and online spriting website to do this.

Caribolt Render with Magistrum Shiny Palette.png
 

Reiga

im dying squirtle
is a Top Artist
"Wow what a cool texture QxC featured in that last post, I wish I could see more about it" you may have been thinking, so here's some juicy bits on those textures:







 

Mintly

formerly Spook
is an Artist


November, a brief period of Fall before Winter begins. Which means Caribolt's Shiny colors couldnt be prettier!
 

QxC4eva

is an Artistis a Forum Moderatoris a Community Contributor
Moderator
So here's my edited version of Nyasu's animation. I didn't change much other than dampen out the movements a bit.


For the smoke I wanted to do some fancy shaders but we'll have to wrap this up soon, I'll just go with a simple wobble effect instead :P


And shiny renders. Thanks to DatHeatmor, Cretacerus and Reiga for the lovely textures!
 
Okay, so I finally got free from college and illness to make a big dump on Cari's rig and animation.

First off, an introduction to the model and the rig. Cari was 100% the easiest prospect between the three of them. Quadrupeds tend to only be able to move certain ways and bend certain ways, which makes rigging and animation more a case of getting the amount of movement just right and less a case of thinking how exactly to animate it.

I will say, this model was a bit weird to work with. The design is very compact, and the model was built to look well when seen from specific angles which made my fave angle to work with (the sideways orthographic view) look very awkward.




This is the rig I went with. You can see that it has very low bone counts on the legs and a very articulated spine, neck and tail. This was a deliberate choice on my end to allow the person who was going to do the render (QxC) to elongate/collapse proportions as needed for the final look.

Another thing you may notice is that Caribolt has little to no neck. This made animating the head movement a royal pain because the collar and horns would clip into the body with too much neck movement.

Something you can see here that you didn't in my last rig since I wasn't animating it are the IK and target bones. I talk of course of the four small prongs on the feet and the floating bones outside the rig. The whole point of those was to be able to completely control the model with a couple bone movement through IK (Inverse Kinematics) which essentially creates 'ripple effects' through response movement to the control bone, and FK (Forward Kinematics) which are the opposite and create connected movement through complimentary transformations.



Here's a couple of test poses I did to try and see what I could do with the rig. The model didn't seem to take to well to certain types of movement, but I feel like it was incredibly functional and rather easy to use.

Now, to the animations. If you look at pokemon animations, most cervid idle animations don't move like, at all. This is incredibly boring in my opinion, which led to me trying to create a more dynamic animation to begin with.

Caribolt animation v 0.1

This was eventually deemed too dynamic so I shifted towards a more conservative, bobbing in place approach without really polishing the cycle you see above.

Caribolt Animation v 0.2

This is the first iteration of said animation, with fairly big movements since I tend to favour that. I was told it looked like cari was doing squats, so I toned down the verticality aspect of the body's movement in further iterations. I also tried to add some nice movement with the ears to break the monotony of the animation. This version went through a ton of changes based on recommendations from mostly QxC to get the actual movement of it as perfect as possible. That included me spending like two and a half hours getting this particular movement right, mostly because the collar meant I had to be really careful with downward movement to prevent clipping

The head bob that took like two hours

We also had some looping issues, since the hyper-articulated spine meant that a fix I had to do for the neck and back foot rippled and tossed every bone one pixel out of loop. Now, you may think one pixel isn't the worst, but on the render cycle it creates a very noticeable jerk or jump. So we fixed that, then reduced the length of the animation from 46 frames to 32 frames on loop. This was the end result (post QxC render):


It came out rather nice, I'd like to think. It has enough movement to not look completely dull, yet static enough to feel like an idle animation. As a final note, it turns out that the fact that I spent so much time articulating the spine was important since in the final render QxC elongated the neck. These are the final results we had, though QxC may have better stills and renders:



All in all, this was really fun. College had meant I hadn't been able to animate in a long while, and rigging is always a treat. That's the rig and animation (and a bit of render) digest for Caribolt. I hope you found this informative!
 
I'd like to suggest posing Snaelstrom with its arms pulled closer to the body. In the official art, the arms look really short and stumpy, more like extensions of a snail's gooey, amorphous body. With the way they are posed now, the arms look extremely well developed, long, and almost powerful.

Also, by nature of the coloration, the viewer's eyes are first drawn to the sky blue parts, so the front legs, extended arms, and obviously the head are the first things you notice, giving it much more of an upright, Goodra-type appearance than that of sturdy, grounded snail. Pulling the arms in will help a lot with that as well. Other things that might help include angling Snaelstrom a little more to the side (so we're not viewing quite so head-on) and maybe lifting the lip of the covering over the back legs slightly, if possible.

Other than that, amazing models. They look beautiful.
 

MrDollSteak

CAP 1v1 me IRL
is a Community Contributoris an Artist Alumnusis a Forum Moderator Alumnus
So here's my edited version of Nyasu's animation. I didn't change much other than dampen out the movements a bit.


For the smoke I wanted to do some fancy shaders but we'll have to wrap this up soon, I'll just go with a simple wobble effect instead :P


And shiny renders. Thanks to DatHeatmor, Cretacerus and Reiga for the lovely textures!
I think that looks MUCH better. I'm still not 100% certain about the leg positioning considering how straight its back is. I think its stance needs to be wider and more angled and its back hunched. Food for thought.
 
I'd like to suggest posing Snaelstrom with its arms pulled closer to the body. In the official art, the arms look really short and stumpy, more like extensions of a snail's gooey, amorphous body. With the way they are posed now, the arms look extremely well developed, long, and almost powerful.

Also, by nature of the coloration, the viewer's eyes are first drawn to the sky blue parts, so the front legs, extended arms, and obviously the head are the first things you notice, giving it much more of an upright, Goodra-type appearance than that of sturdy, grounded snail. Pulling the arms in will help a lot with that as well. Other things that might help include angling Snaelstrom a little more to the side (so we're not viewing quite so head-on) and maybe lifting the lip of the covering over the back legs slightly, if possible.

Other than that, amazing models. They look beautiful.
just so you know, the snail is a t-pose that hasnt been posed/animated yet. and thx!
 

QxC4eva

is an Artistis a Forum Moderatoris a Community Contributor
Moderator
CAP 25 Playtest Renders
Model sheets: Magistrum
/ Yilx
/ Pipotchi
/ QxC4eva

Wireframes: Clawed Nyasu
/ Pipotchi
/ StephXPM
/ QxC4eva

UV maps: Clawed Nyasu
/ Pipotchi
/ QxC4eva

UV guides: Cretacerus
/ QxC4eva
/ Pipotchi

Textures: Reiga
/ DatHeatmor
/ Cretacerus

Rigs: Clawed Nyasu
/ QxC4eva
/ Zephias

Animations: Zephias
/ Clawed Nyasu
/ Pipotchi
/ QxC4eva (edits)
Visual effects: QxC4eva

Renders: QxC4eva

Feedback: our team + Quanyails pokehimon Darquezze Salient Birkal flying moose Warren685 Roland le preaux ShunosaurusLii --- thank you all!

 
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MrDollSteak

CAP 1v1 me IRL
is a Community Contributoris an Artist Alumnusis a Forum Moderator Alumnus
CAP 25 Playtest Renders
Model sheets: Magistrum
/ Yilx
/ Pipotchi
/ QxC4eva

Wireframes: Clawed Nyasu
/ Pipotchi
/ StephXPM
/ QxC4eva

UV mappings: Clawed Nyasu
/ Pipotchi
/ QxC4eva

UV guides: Cretacerus
/ QxC4eva
/ Pipotchi

Textures: Reiga
/ DatHeatmor
/ Cretacerus

Rigs: Clawed Nyasu
/ QxC4eva
/ Zephias

Animations: Zephias
/ Clawed Nyasu
/ Pipotchi
/ QxC4eva (edits)
Visual effects: QxC4eva

Renders: QxC4eva

Feedback: our team + Quanyails pokehimon Darquezze Salient Birkal flying moose Warren685 Roland le preaux ShunosaurusLii --- thank you all!

Absolutely amazing. Smokomodo with smoke and glow is breathtaking, and the new pose on feet is excellent!
 

DJTHED

Amateur 3D Animator
is a Top Artist
Great work guys! So happy to still see this project going and getting better after I've left.
 
Thank you all for your work. The result is jaw-dropping, especially in the case of Smokomodo in my opinion. Congratulations.
 
I'm constantly blown away by the efficiency and professionalism of the 3D modeling team... Great job guys! Smoky in particular seems like it was not an easy task, but the end result is phenomenal.
 
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G-Luke

Sugar, Spice and One For All
is a Community Contributoris a CAP Contributoris a Forum Moderator Alumnus
Hi, newbie here. Will these new caps be added to showdown any soon as I love showdown because it is awesome.
Hello! While this isnt the thread to ask that question, expect the new CAPs to be implemented unto Showdown very soon. In the meantime you can hop on over to the discord server, linked here, to talk about CAP and answer any questions you have. We all would be happy to help!
 

Birkal

We have the technology.
is a Top Artistis a Top CAP Contributoris a Top Smogon Media Contributoris a Site Content Manager Alumnusis a Battle Simulator Admin Alumnusis a Senior Staff Member Alumnusis a Community Contributor Alumnus
So I know that CAP25 was a truly Herculean effort, but now that it's over, are we close on a few other models? I just saw Pyroak yesterday and was blown away by the model! You guys are the best :) But it seemed like we were so close on a few models (Fidgit / Kerfluffle). Is there any chance we could get one or two finalized before CAP26?
 

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