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!
Thank you buddy! And believe me when I say it warms my heart to hear that someone loved a work of art of mine
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
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
(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!)
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.
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)
