week one of my personal challenge, outfit / costume a week.
based on the wonderful work of Toraji : https://www.artstation.com/artwork/e0DDNX

- had fun with this one, really different from stuff I'd normally make.
cloth sims made up a lot of the work - started with a clean quad blockout mesh, sim'd parts as required.

- was difficult getting it to fit to my body so I ended up just masking the body out except for the hands and feet. this made it much easier to get a silhouette closer to the original (butt 2 big)

- for whatever reason this was a pain to bake + still has some odd normal artifacts. some of this was down to triangulation, which I did some manual work on, as seen in the wireframe there are some triangulations in the main base to force the cloth direction.

- the seam piping on the edge was the last thing to go on. this needs to be the absolute last part to go on IMO. It's a curve made from the edge of the mesh, and I transferred the vertex weights of those edge vertices to the corresponding loop.

- made the cape but ultimately didn't like it. looks too military and a bit out of place with the direction I went with materials.

- the UV's are quadrangled and arranged to enable detail tiling (and high coverage), in order to hold up to extreme close up scrutiny in VR.
got a really good texture coverage as a result (0.93 pog)

potential improvements:
- pant legs look boring - i think some embroidery on the sides / pattern is necessary and it helps the original concept a lot, so my bad for deviating there
- weight painting overall is a bit jank, especially on shoulder.
- find a way to make the cape work
- properly do hair - it's just scale 0 bones on the bangs and rotated scaled polytail - good cheap hack, but could look better
- pockets. i thought removing them would accentuate the long-leg aspect of the outfit, but removing those + no leg detail means there's a huge patch of *nothing*. those details put the 30 on the 70.
final renders were done in Blender, further processed in Krita