[WIP] APZ's New Canon Cloud

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APZ,
 When I read your posts, I can not help but read them with the fervor of someone hyped up on several cups of coffee. That does make me lol... Ah, good times. Anyways, five years and the messages are going strong because your work is amazing. It is with great pride I say (with many yelling the same), your first model is remembered and cherished as much as the game itself. This my good sir is why we know you will not let us down. I am getting on in years (24,lol) and know there is more to a game than the way it plays. It is called atmosphere! Your art is part of the Great atmosphere this game provides. You interned at Sony? Hopefully they learned something from you!

Good Day.... I said GOOD DAY!
 
APZ,
 When I read your posts, I can not help but read them with the fervor of someone hyped up on several cups of coffee. That does make me lol... Ah, good times. Anyways, five years and the messages are going strong because your work is amazing. It is with great pride I say (with many yelling the same), your first model is remembered and cherished as much as the game itself. This my good sir is why we know you will not let us down. I am getting on in years (24,lol) and know there is more to a game than the way it plays. It is called atmosphere! Your art is part of the Great atmosphere this game provides. You interned at Sony? Hopefully they learned something from you!

Good Day.... I said GOOD DAY!
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Thank you buddy!  And believe me when I say it warms my heart to hear that someone loved a work of art of mine  :D Quite honestly... works of love and passion are my most treasured of any kind of art. I understand what it means to love something someone else made, even if it wasn't their idea. Much like the song covers I love to listen to on youtube.

Let me also say that I don't believe I deserve such glorious praise (although I'm prone to doing the same from time to time to other internet artists) I merely studied closely the style of Kingdom Hearts and did my best to replicate it. That's more or less it, but I can definitely see a bit of a commonality with my other work. (I wouldn't go so far to say my style, more like my preferences)

My laziest part was replicating the same facial polygons (I DID NOT copy and paste!) In the same way you'd draw from a photograph sitting next to your paper without tracing (There's no use arguing with some folks, they won't believe me BECAUSE===>) I literally just dropped in the face texture from Dissidia's Cloud. Honestly it's been so long I can't remember if I did it on purpose or if I just never finished painting my own with the Dissidia texture as a reference (There's a partially completed painted face to this day still in the photoshop file)

Once that truth got out, there were many here who lost respect for me... and right or wrong, justified or not... I deserved it  :o In my humble opinion. I let folks down (Really? Over this silly model I made for zero profit?) Yes indeed :) But no matter. If I can rub two days together when I'm not busy as all hell I'll crank out a better Cloud!

IN THE MEAN BY! I might as well finish painting that face tonight so yall folks can have the Classic APZ Cloud I still get e-mails for to this day!  ;)

edit: I passed out after typing this  ;D (What can I say? I haven't graduated college yet)

So! Without further ado... I painted this up real quick from scratch. Submitted for your approval, I present to you the repainted head. If it pleases the court... I'll process and repackage the old Cloud for download again and all can be right in the world. (Bear in mind that the face texture is the sole part of my Cloud that wasn't my own work!)

cloudcomparison.gif


This gif was upscaled 200% nearest neighbor (which means no smoothing) I deliberately pushed the shadows around so that no one can call any laziness on my part. I painted this new face from scratch, it is not a smudge tooled copy of the old face. (Although the eyes are scaled copies of the FFVII Final Battle model's, keep it closer to the source material) It's different but produces the same feeling. And fits into the uv's the same way. The only different is when you zoom in all the way. Other than that... it's unique and 100% my work.

cloudcomparison-1.jpg


If we can all agree upon this... I'll make APZ Cloud available again. Deal? Mods, this is up to you. I'll do the rest, with your blessing (and another draft to tighten things up a bit, I need to sleep)
 
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Not quite  ;) Part of that "tightening up" I spoke of at the end of my long dialogue. It's not as sharp, one of those things you don't see as glaring until you take a step back and see it objectively. But I'm also on the fence because the slightly less sharp face matches the style of the rest of the texture
 
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Don't like the fact he looks younger, a face closer to the videos ingame would be better but.. this model is better than no new model.
 
lol, I was just thinking about the APZ cloud model, and how "couldn't he just redo the face texture?" And I come here and he did!
 
He has a "perdy mouth" does he?  :P Well... I went ahead and straightened it out a bit more keeping closer to the way yall are used to seeing APZ Cloud.

This is the final pass on him. With the mods approval I'll hook it up and make it available to download again.

-Click to see larger

-Click to see larger
 
Only packaged with the "New Canon Cloud" I haven't made yet  :P

Although it IS an awesome model. I made it from the Crisis Core rendered poses of Zack and I'm pretty proud of how it came out. (It only took me... what... Like a couple of hours over the course of a few days?)

The Cloud I'm going to Zbrush sculpt the model, and then retopo him and bake in the details. It'll be higher poly than APZ Cloud. But there's no need for him to be current gen detailed, he won't have dynamic cloth or facial animation, more polys is just a waste (ESPECIALLY without any skin weights) But don't worry, just because I'm not giving him a million polys doesn't mean he won't look awesome. (More isn't better if you can't see the difference)

On the other note... I guess I'll message the mods? I won't release the fixed APZ Cloud unless everyone's cool with it
 
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Release it whenever you're ready dude.  If anyone has a problem with it they can bring it up with me.
 
Release it whenever you're ready dude.  If anyone has a problem with it they can bring it up with me.
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Righteous. And while we're at it... It'd be nice to remove that ugly "Original Content means not swiping UVs either." From the release page? https://www.ff7catalog.com/threads/5233/

Seeing as how I can't edit that page (Or insert the new download link once it's uploaded)

School's outright killing me at the moment...  :oops: sigh... But I'll have it up asap
 
The anticipation for this model's release is palpable. I'd love to be able to use a Cloud that isn't AC based for a change. >_>
 
New face looks good. It gives him more expression. I know he's supposed to be like "Whatever" or "I'm not interested"...but this replaces that robotic blank face that is akin to FF7 advent children
 
Im not digging the chubby young face, but great work nonetheless!

Glad I have original Apz Cloud :P
 
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