Low poly render of e.x.weis's OC Reika, a cyber punk succubus woman with long dark hair, magenta eyes, thick thighs, and large breasts. She stands with her hip pushed out and one arm holding the other, situated under her bust. She wears a low cut crop dark crop top, fishnet sleeves, leggings with microchip patterns, and black knee-high boots with magenta laces.

Low poly render of e.x.weis's OC Reika.

I found e.x.weis in the twilight of Cohost while looking for artists to keep track of. As an absolute sucker for succubi, Reika immediately drew me in, and their intensely colored and evocative backgrounds sealed the deal. Unfortunately I missed out on modeling Reika during Artfight 2025, but her new reference sheet was an excellent excuse to fix that.

My Reika model is N64 inspired - that is, I kept my triangle count reasonable (525 triangles) and used several small textures (everything compiled fits into a 64px square area) with vertex colors used for shading. However, I definitely cut a few technical corners - one of those textures is a simple palette (which very much cheats and uses Nearest Neighbor scaling, though I suppose it could have used Bilinear, but I digress). For technical accuracy, I would've needed to look into more raw vertex coloring for flatly colored areas, which I would then need to take into consideration neighboring textured elements, but also maybe this mixture of solutions may not be technically accurate to the console hardware so maybe this and that and so on and so on.

This next part is definitely inspired by Aenore's post about virtual photography and talking about art. So I'm going to talk about my art some more.

So why N64 styling? To be honest, PSX style would likely have fit Reika better. Being a more mature character, her vibe just hits more of that PSX counter culture in my mind. Ultimately, it comes down to what I wanted to work with at the time I started the project (and also when I was preparing to texture the base model). I started this model on Christmas Eve, wanting a quick turnaround to hopefully hit Christmas Day (this was a laughable goal in hindsight), or more realistically wrap things up before New Year's. I wanted to do more simple blocked out, broken up geometry. I wanted to make use of repeating textures for the fishnet sleeves and some other fun tricks that don't work with a larger PSX textures.

Basically I wanted to do all the things I didn't do in my previous model, which was a long drawn out project. This was meant to be fast and fun. And it was. Mostly - fast is still very relative given my current working speed and how much time 3D takes in general.

Low poly turntable animation of e.x.weis's OC Reika.

Turntable animation of e.x.weis's OC Reika.

Actually, let's dig into that speed thing a bit. The time tracker plugin I use for Blender tells me I spent just shy of 12 hours working on this model in Blender. That means all my texture work in external programs isn't really counted. It also rolls back the clock anytime I undo, which I use extensively (that's just digital art, right?). Interestingly, this tracker also lists each session for the file.

  • Session 0 (Before): 7 minutes. This is time tracked from my starting point and pre-existing template file. There's a bunch of default options in Blender I don't love, so I have a template file that has those options set to what I want, some base layout collections, and just little things I don't want to do every time I start a new project. The "Before" aspect of this session means this is time tracked in the previous version of this file - which I must admit includes a smidge of pre-work I did before initially saving the file under a misspelled name.
  • Session 1: 4 hours. Base modeling. By the end of this session, I had the core geometry and character shape.
  • Session 2: 40 minutes. I think this was when I spent time trying to set up some proper UV seams and shells and such stuff I need to practice more of. (I ended up not using a lot of these UV shells in the end.)
  • Session 3: 24 minutes. I believe this was setting up some flat colors on the model to get a better of idea of how she was looking so far. It was at this time I confirmed her chest needed to be reworked - I had tried modeling her breast shapes independently to allow for separation like the art I was pulling her outfit from. Ultimately, it just looked wrong and didn't have the weight it should.
  • Session 4: 4 hours, 15 minutes. I streamed this, so you can watch the archived session on YouTube if you want. Notably, that video is 6 hours and 22 minutes long - over 2 hours difference from what my time tracker captures (and while I did take a few decent breaks during stream, 2-ish hours feels about right for the non-Blender texture work). First was reworking torso and breasts (done off screen for fear of angering Twitch ToS), then diving into texturing - which unfortunately was a lot of off screen work as well since I didn't want to deal with display capturing and just left Blender up the whole time. By the end of this session, there were some key textures to wrap up, but she now had a face and most of an outfit.
  • Session 5: 2 hours, 30 minutes. Wrapping everything up. Shoulder, chest, and stomach textures, a few fiddly bits, and also adding a simple deform skeleton, skinning, and posing. Camera placement, animation setup, and rendering. Not captured are the couple of hours afterword for creating a background image, rendering the .gif and .mp4 files, putting things together and other such busy work for actually posting things anywere.

So that's about it. Overall, I'm happy with how this model came out, and I'm glad to have finally gotten to model Reika.