MineZapp

the bell fields were extremely quick to set up with the array modifier, which is great, because they were a bit last-minute after realizing just using deltarune spritework for the bg looked awful.. the raw render also looks slightly different, since i had wanted it to look much moodier for most of the project:

which would be nice if it didn't kill every detail in a 50 mile radius, but oh well! i did some light editing w/ color dodge and contrast until everything was clearer.

also did more work with materials this time around, mainly using procedural textures for normal/bump mapping. the skirt uses blender's inbuilt wave texture to paint stripes, as well as the boundaries between each stripe, which are then used to fake some extra depth in the model by using them as a bump map..

meanwhile, on the b-side, a random noise texture is stretched wide and used the same way, giving the impression of brushed metal - this is also plugged into the stripes from before for a little texture

and all of this gets fed into the same BSDF to make a nice bell-like skirt.

the brushed metal texture gets re-used on pretty much every other material, and the technique of converting brightness to normals is also used for the embossed swirls and runes on the bells.

these were also mostly done in blender, because rendering a flat piece of geometry is easier than learning adobe illustrator. there's a little square camera that renders them out, and then i pump up the contrast externally.

the model has a really basic rig for posing, but it's not really anything special, since i barely had to account for deforming or weights or whatever. probably the only interesting thing about is is that there's a REALLY basic IK setup on the hair, but like.. it could be soooo much better lol

the skirt also had a deeply irritating issue where blender played kind of weird with the skirt normals for some reason, and i could not find out what the hell was causing this, so i just had to work around it by making them much less pronounced. it was going to be much rounder originally.. ah well

the metal texture is perfectly fitting here, i love it so much, and it makes the reflections look so interesting!

the version with the more subtle bumps is about what i was imagining, i think i prefer what you ended up going with, even if it was only due to glitchy rendering

the way all the different bells and pieces connect together is so perfect, and i especially enjoy the width and thickness of the hands.

my favorite part that you didn't mention here is the glow of the red handle at the top, and the way it reflects off of everything!! the resulting pinkish and white highlights in the final image are beautiful, and it makes so much sense for it to glow considering how bright that bit is in the original sprite compared to the rest of the character.