3D Divas

Your Favorite Divas, in three dimensions

I’ve been making 3D art about as long as I’ve been doing drag. Maybe even a little longer

I wanna make games someday! But for now at least I’ve got some neat art to show you.

Well, one neat art piece! I’ll upload more here eventually, but for now I just want to show you an in depth look at the process behind this work. I hope you find it interesting even if you don’t understand it!

Can you guess who this is?

It’s not me, Flaminia (but I will make a 3D self-portrait eventually).

It’s the mesmerizing Moxie, duh!

This is still a work in progress, but I’m happy with what I have so far! I did a great job capturing her likeness and wanted to give some insight into the process behind making something like this.

The first step was looking at reference images. I started by browsing her Instagram and Connecticut drag articles. When working on a character design it’s important to figure out the essence of the person you’re making.

What are the features that stand out the most about Moxie?

She loves an extra big ass ponytail and a side swept bang. She has a slender face. It’s defined and angular, but still soft. She’s very sleek, with lots of long lines. Before I make a 3D model I’ll usually do some 2D art to get a quicker feel for what I want. The hair in these sketches is a lot wavier and curlier then what I ended up modeling. I might go back and change the model idk art is a process or shwhatever

After making the model I painted a texture. This is what Moxie would look like if you peeled off all her skin and laid it out flat! I do not recommend doing this as it would not be nice. I made this directly in Blender using a computer mouse. I’ve painted textures on tablet before, and I know it’s technically the more professional method, but I enjoy working with mouse (if you couldn’t already tell by my MS Paint page).

My style is relatively simple. I don’t aim for realism, but I do like a sense of believability and lifelikeness. I take a lot of inspiration from fashion dolls.

Her tights are on a separate semi-transparent 1024x1024 texture that I then combined with the base texture. I might delete the underwear and bikini straps and do them this way as well. Eventually I wanna have lots more clothes for her, and for anything skintight it’s faster to just paint it on the skin. Plus, it doesn’t cause weird clipping to happen during animation.

I refined some techniques I’ve used on other models (that I’ll post here eventually) to mimic shading effects used in 2D digital art.

This is the shader graph for Moxie. Something that probably means nothing to most of the people reading this. Believe it or not, this is actually relatively simple

Her hair uses a different material that’s pretty similar, except it also has anisotropy (something I followed a tutorial for and super don’t feel like explaining). The shoes and accessories share that material for I am lazy and didn’t wanna make more shit a cohesive look from head to toe.