The Skeleton Chair Meme
Or, wasting my time on things that are fun but ultimately pointless. I’m trying to focus on the having fun part though, if only to distract from my shop hiatus.
My latest foray into high-effort shitposting, a favorite hobby of mine, is this Skeleton Rocking Chair commonly seen in internet memes usually about caffeine or sleep deprivation. I thought it would be a hilarious and fun project to embark on to continue honing my 3d modeling and texturing workflow and skills since the more I’m doing, the more confident and faster I’ve become with future projects.
the current mesh and texture vs one of the reference pictures I was working from
This particular model started with using the SimRipper program to export the model of my skeleton sim Delta. I then uploaded them to Mixamo to get a basic rig applied as the models don’t appear to include rigs by default. My wife then assisted me with posing the model into a rough approximation of the chair’s position using a premade rocking chair model for a height reference. I then spent a while coaxing the mesh closer and closer to the finished product and distorting the proportions to match the chair (there have been several interpretations of what a skeleton chair looks like and they’re all pretty horrifying), most of which include the hilariously proportioned ribs and pelvis.
in progress shot checking if Sims4Studio would accept my mesh at all, ignore the bad uv mapping
an in progress shot with the normals matcap applied
the inspiration and a basic red smart material applied to the mesh in Substance Painter
It’s finally in a finished enough state where I can bring my rocking chair into the game and test it for sizing and rig alignment. If those are good, I can do a bit of work on lowering the polycount of the mesh. It’s a little high poly at the moment for a chair - about 15k polygons and I’d like it to be more like half of that. Overall, I’m very satisfied with how it turned out, and how quickly I turned it around. I think it’s been maybe a week of on and off tinkering.
