Deadly Carp

old pfp for comparison (made in around 2024)

without and with compositing (learned here how to do it, it's pretty fun to tweak the settings)

also this model (which had 3 revisions, only used the first for my pfp and then never used the other ones (maybe once in an animation test ?)) always crashed when it was loaded, and not just the version for the pfp, the second one and the third one (every time i remade it from scratch so i have absolutely no idea why it happened every single time)

the structure of the old pfp is basically the same as the new one, a background (they have similar types of materials), the character made of a bunch of visibly separated meshes, a sphere for a head and Xs as eyes, in the first one it's either a drawing or a font in krita which was then shrinkwrapped around the head and in the second one it's blender text which was transformed into a mesh and then i remade it using that one as a base since it had way to many weirdly places polygons and then used shrinkwrap, the shader is yellow and emissive with the emissive color set to yellow, in the first one i think it was set to white

for the new one i tried to keep the same pose and attempt the same lighting (without looking at the original file of course) i couldn't do the exact same thing since it was made in an older blender version (4.1 i think maybe before (i think it was between 4.0 and 4.1 since the principled bsdf was new)) and the way some things work was modified (i think they changed how you modify ) and i've gotten better (first model, 7+ hours, this one, ~1 hour) also it doesn't crash now :)

since a lot of people thought my character was red because of the weird lighting it's a bit lighter, i also made sure it was understandable that the eyes are yellow because since in the first one the red lighting is so strong you don't really understand the colors, example :

yes this is fanart of me a friend made, yes it's really f*cking cool, he's cool, i also told him and showed him the original model and he understood the colors and made these bangers (DRIVING IN MY CARP)

the compositing for the new pfp is a lot more complex (even if simple) since the old one was just glare, this one has sensor noise, a glare.

i now it's not really complicated or anything but it looks good, here's in comparison something i think is slightly complicated (very overkill) (made for another pfp for a big side project):

also the hair is a slightly modified version (decimate + merged a few vertices and moved them around) of a miis hair from Joey Carlinos Blender Mii Maker (after checking, the hair in that project is from an old deviant art post that ripped all mii assets ???)

on the shirt there's a weird logo, it's my logo i just don't use it anywhere since where tf would i need a logo, i'll probably use it in my game (which i maybe need to make an update post about), had to use a color ramp to change the opacity, it would be cool if it was in the image node

it's supposed to be a D that looks like a fish and a C for deadly carp, someone told me it looked like a 4 ? idk