I had spent a decent amount of time regaling 10yo with hilarious episodes of my 3d experimentations revolving around the shenanigans that can happen when one doesn't parent controllers properly or grabs bones instead of controllers by accident and stuff like that. Then to prove that parents don't know everything I showed him that I was researching some way to use a complete dynatopo sculpt rather than finishing off the multires one I was working on. While talking to him I started fixing up some errors I hadn't noticed in the dynatopo sculpt at the time and zoomed out a bit too far, causing a brush stroke to remove too much detail over the bit I brushed over. I cried out "OH CRAP" and promptly hit the undo combo. 10yo came scurrying into the room crying "WAIT I WANT TO SEE YOUR HORRENDOUS MISTAKE!"
I was working on 3d-bek's feet when 5yo came in and observed what was on my screen.
He stared for a little bit, then leaned on my desk so he could pick up and scrutinise his own cute little foot carefully before pointing out that toes weren't square, but at least I got one right. I told him that my base model was very square and I was fixing it up as I made my characters, and that's what I was doing right now. He wished me luck fixing it up and trotted on his merry way. Cutely.
And the foot is coming along nicely. Be onto UV mapping, cloth dynamics and hair in about that order soonish.
This is another one of those rare instances where I post to an external site before the blog.
I haven't had a chance to set up a video thingi yet and am not willing to do it from Christmas Island (internet is tooooooooo slooooooowwwwwwww) so I am attempting to finally try to start getting over the grudge I have against Google over their mind numbingly idiotic real names policy that resulted in the nymwars (to their credit they have seemed to realise how stupid the policy was and how stupid it made them look and are now letting people call themselves whatever, and are now no longer forcing Youtube channels to be attached to G+ pages if you decide you don't actually want to use your own name, I have decided I seriously can't be bothered trying to recreate my old ryivhnn channel.
Learning how to texture in Blender. Here we have agonisingly basic skin, lip, eye and teeth shaders (the teeth were so basic that if I'd been using Lightwave I wouldn't have bothered with nodes but Blender seems to use nodes for anything more complicated than a colour it seems, which is cool). Should hopefully be able to build on them on a per character basis.
At 8yo's request: "Make him frown!" (all the bases are gender neutral)
Seeing something mildly disturbing
Shock horror! I could have opened its mouth more but I was too lazy to go back to object mode to show the rig layer to be able to grab the jaw controller
To get a point that was moved incorrectly for whatever reason in a shape key and needs to be reset to the "Basis" position, from Adhi on StackExchange:
Use Blend From Shape:
Kind of wish there was a slightly less arseabout way to do it but a way is better than no way.
Still shape keying. Base is partially amused.
So far I've got all of a left eye wink and a half smile. Once I got the left half smile right and figure out where the eyelashes go I'll mirror those shape keys and then do some really basic expression parts around happy, sad, angry and surprise which generally use the entire face. Then make some phonemes with help from this useful phoneme shape guide someone had thoughtfully thrown at the internet.
Sculpt mode is awesome for shape keying.
Thought to do a quickie render rather than a screencap of the handstand splits, decided I couldn't be bothered fixing the lights at this stage so ticked the "Freestyle" box and left it at default everything.
It's pretty cool; I could almost pretend I know how to draw with this.
Vaguely related, grease pencil is the most useful thing ever put into a 3d app.
bek can rig, though I'm sure I'm probably doing it horribly wrong. It's a combination of rigging techniques learned in Lightwave and playing with the Armature modifier, with one tangent into using bendy bones (single bones with multiple segments) for the spine from the head down and then two bendy bones for neck and spine.
Had to put one more controller in to flex the spine in the right direction. The neck flexes one way (looking downward) fine but will not flex the other way (it's jaggy in this pose, effects can be seen if you look carefully at the neck), adding another shape to control the flex like I did with the spine didn't help and neither did my aforementioned tangent into bendy bones.
