Mod Scope: Why mods take longer to make now than they did in the past.

Hello my marvelous mammary makers!

So this is a post I've wanted to talk about for some time as its likely something a lot of people don't know. Especially if you are not a 3D artist yourself or familiar in the process.

So in this little write-up i want to break down the many parts of creation of a mod like the ones i have been making for many years now and why there was such a steep decline in the output of mods once i moved past MHW modding.

Also its a bit of a more technical breakdown into what goes into these projects as it has been something requested for some time by people on the discord. Feel free to skip this read if you don't want to learn more on the actual workflows involved.

The difference in approach

The quick and Dirty way:

When i started modding MHW i was brand new to 3D, i had very little understanding of what i was doing. I had found i could use the Sculpting took to basically reshape models to the shapes i wanted, and its what i took full advantage of doing.

I sculpted the armors using this took but this comes with many downsides, the primary one being that this is a tool more or less made for organic material, not solid ones.

So this is why you see stuff like the metal bending weirdly or my personal favorite being the chain on the original seething Bazelguese Mega armor i made not exactly acting like chains do.

Notice how they literally bend pure metal in order to actually follow the sculpting.
This is the reason so much of my old content look stretched.

Because it literally was just that, stretched.
While there is nothing wrong with this approach to 3D retrofitting outfits (skyrim's Bodyslide being a perfect example) this does start to show its problems once you go past a more "average" body shape into the extremes like my mods always been heavily focused around.

When you reach these sizes you start to clearly have severe stretching going on and it starts being very noticeable which might been harder to distinguish on a smaller sized body mod.

The clean but time consuming way:

When i was reworking a lot of these armors for MHR and when starting with MHR i did eventually decide that i would only do a single size rather than trying to maintain 4-5 different sizes as its insane the extra workload that put me under.
I also decided i wanted to take extra time and make sure the models was made with this design in mind from the start and that they would look correct.
So due to that i was researching a lot on how to make my own models and assets in ways that wasnt just copying things off something else and slapping it together.

Leading to models looking far more clean and properly made as such

Notice how the chains and the metal pieces does not bend, this is due to me treating these as metal (Doesnt bend). Seperating them from the meshes and working with them seperately.

Many times this work means doing things procedural instead of the standard 3D moddeling methods people often use for mods.
This is done through working with non rasterized workflows and clever modifier stacks in order to achieve the results.

With the chains the method i did was essentially making a single new chain link, Then having they add links depending on how long the curve were each rotating 90°. And finally for the chain mesh to follow the curve which when its all combined achieves this
But stuff like this takes a lot more time to do, one takes maybe 10-20 minutes while the other takes hours. Its all very dependant on what has to be done to create the meshes properly without cutting corners.

Remaking the mesh from scratch

Another method I've done for some time now is more or less just recreating the meshes from scratch rather than even bother with trying to sculpt the armors to fit because its clear from the get-go that they will never fit properly.
The issue with forcefully retrofitting it to fit the shapes is that the actual model topology becomes an absolute mess
Take this Innerwear model im working on as an example.

In 3D modelling we prefer to work with squares, Game engines prefers Triangles. And while you can always cut a Square into two Triangles, its harder for a program to know which two triangles makes the same square. Combine that when you start forcefully moving and bending this shape out of position it now starts to also have rather uneven distribution of the mesh shape.

Compare this with the remade leather section i did for this same mesh

Notice how the mesh now bends properly with the mesh. (do note this mesh is not finished yet, i still need to tweak it at places).

I also used the same method as above with the chains for the thread along the side of the mesh. Which i also had to recreate using 2 curves One that controls the shape of the thread (the circle mesh part) and the other that controls the actual path the thread takes.

The left curve is a circle curve, this controls the shape the 2nd curve has, Ive used these for things like this, Belts are another bit one i use this method for but with a Square curve as shape rather than circle.

The Sculpting + Retopo + Baking process

Then there is cases like with the Peach Showtime where i more or less wanted to make thing from scratch with little to no original parts left in its creation, which means that i have to sculpt a high poly mesh with details like cloth threads.
This is the Princess Showtime detective shirt sculpt

This mesh alone is 5.7 GB because of how high poly it is. Its so dense you cannot even see the vertices when looking at it in wireframe mode
Then this mesh is remade much more optimized than the high poly sculpt. While baking the details (calculating the shadows, light bounces and such onto textures) of the high poly mesh onto this optimized version.

All this resulting in the final product everyone can see in the final mod

The thing is though, Doing things this way is very time consuming. it is also not particularly easy specifically due to how large the "assets"  are with my mods.
Since i have the breasts overlap due to sort of creating the look of breasts pushed together while at the same time not being extremely taxing for the PC's to run (or in this case, The switch). This approach comes with the side effect that i cannot bake directly with the full body mesh, Since the mesh then gets extremely dark spots where the breasts intersect given to the program that is a collision point meant to look like it has contact shadows in the textures. This is by design of the software and how baking works. Its just an unfortunate issue i have to work around.
So sometimes i have to bake each mesh twice, once for each side of the body and then merge these textures in photoshop afterwards.

Conclusion

So these things combined is the biggest culprits behind why my production output started slowing down over the years.
As i grew as an artist and learned my craft more and more i wasnt content just remaking the wheel and doing the same thing over and over without ever really growing in my skill set.

Sculpting is a great way to get into 3D and i can highly recommend people start with it as its very easy to grasp given it is very much a "work with clay" which almost anyone have done when young.
But after a certain point you have already mastered that technique and no matter if you do it a 10 000 times or 1000 times, there will be nothing new to learn from it.

Hopefully this write-up was insightful into what goes into making these projects and why they have over time started taking longer and longer to complete.