Greetings, dungeoneers, and welcome back to another Fur Quests update!

Today is a very exciting update for me, as I believe it marks a huge turning point in my journey as an artist. I've been struggling to improve my art for years — until last year, when I finally reached a level I felt comfortable enough to start implementing it into my work in earnest. But first, I needed to find a style that not only matched Fae's lovely illustrations but also worked for me. In a perfect world, the whole game would look like something out of Arcane, but that level of technical detail — not to mention the time is simply beyond me.

So, I started treating the 3D model like a miniature: sculpting very little detail but painting it in instead. During this early approach, I drew inspiration from comic books and the Borderlands series. I was pretty pleased with how things were coming along... until I zoomed out. 

All those little details I'd painstakingly painted barely showed up at all — and in the RPG, we'd be zooming out much farther!

It became clear that I needed a new approach — something simple and striking, but with more features and definition than you'd typically see in anime-inspired 3D. For this, I turned to one of my all-time favorite sources of inspiration: the Hades games. After studying that style for a while, I came up with this.

Now, there were some mistakes along the way that I'll aim to correct in future works, but I'm already very happy with how she turned out. This method I've discovered also allows for quick and simple character generation — far beyond anything I thought was possible before.

Painting in the details takes time, sure — but once they're there, it's as simple as moving a slider along a bar to completely change the character. As I create more characters and expand my asset library of clothes and equipment, this will become a fast, flexible way to generate countless NPCs. And as promised, I'll be putting all of this into a tutorial to share with all of you once I've pinned down the workflow. There are just a few more things I need to figure out before then.

The main hurdle is that this shader only works with two colors: highlight and shadow. That makes characters like Celine — who isn't just crimson, but also has shades of gold — impossible to render with the current approach. But I already have some ideas on how to solve that over the weekend.

That's it for now! There won't be an update to the current build this week, as I'm about to move to a new apartment. The effort of getting everything sorted has left me too mentally drained to work with RPG Maker. But this character workflow has been an incredibly exciting learning process for me — a huge step toward making Fur Quests into the game I've always dreamed it could be.

So what's next? A while back, I signed up for Joy of 3D's stylized animation course, and I'm really looking forward to diving into that!

As always, a huge thanks to our backers on Patreon and Subscribestar. I spent years dreaming of becoming a 3D artist but wasted many of them procrastinating over small things. But your support has given me the drive and motivation to push my art beyond anything I thought I was capable of just a few years ago — and I'll always owe you all for that. Thank you.