Polaris Australis

You're supposed to start any model by making a blockout (using basic shapes to make the proportions) then a highpoly model to make the normal maps from, then a lowpoly model which is the actual final mesh.

I think I completed a lot of the body and the clothes first, but I'm due giving them another look to remake the topology. They're pretty low poly partially because I don't want my computer to blow up trying to render six models at the same time.

My second attempt at modeling a body and first at the hands. I'm remaking those too btw (not pictured here). There's no feet yet (they're complicated). Also I wanna make the proportions a bit more stylized than in canon

Can I just say that during planning I was annoyed at Ichimatsu bc he's the only one with both the messy hair and bare feet so I need to model at lot more for those lol

Anyway my main reference for the face was the video for that 3D live event they did...

I thought because they're cartoony I could just do the lowpoly from the start. Nope. Fellow newbies, quad spheres and whanot are good for blocking but not for retopology. Do the retopo yourself just trust me on this one

If you're doing retopo on Blender with a highpoly like me you just need to snap to "face closest". The shrinkwrap modifier can also help depending on what you're trying to do

The good side is that I could use my first attempt as a highpoly to make the lowpoly from. I looked at the article by AnimeCGLab about types of face topology, and determined that the Matsus require mixing the "sihouette type" for the shape of the face, and the "deformed type" for the mouth animation.

This is what I ended up with. There shouldn't be any triangles, but at that point I was going crazy.

This is why there shouldn't be triangles:

You're supposed to only use quads aka polygons with 4 vertices/edges, and technically those are but they were not working out at all. Eventually I just fixed everything and made them proper quads.

Next, while procrastinating finishing the ears, I've been making the eyes:

That's also how the face topology looks right now. The edge loops should be at the same distance, mine are not because I was trying to see how I could reduce the number of the ones on the cheeks but not on the nose. Still working on that. Everything else looks good I hope.

Lastly, in the meantime I was testing how to make toon shaders and lineart too:

Ignore the bad shadows, the hair being blue on the underside and the slight gradient on the face, I know how to fix all of those, for the moment I just wanted to test what I could work with and see how it was relevant to modeling the rest.

This is being a long process because not only it's my first model I make and actually have a clue about what I'm doing, but also because I have to model, rig and pose all the expressions, which is why I'm doing their basic outfit instead of jumping to more complex ones. I'm kinda scared to move on to some of the next steps of the process but surely it won't be as bad as I'm anticipating.