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Sep
06
2015

Particle feathers

Blender Avian with particle feathers

Particle feathers look a hell of a lot better than polygon feathers but take about a million years to render.  This frame took 50mins.  This would be why people use polygon feathers with texture maps.

...at this stage I may bite the excessive render times for the nicer appearance.

Aug
27
2015

Can't fudge this

The good thing about drawing is that you can blithely say that your character has a 20m wingspan and still draw them folded up neatly against their backs in the pose everyone expects, which is something similar to my short-armed redo which had a roughly 5m wingspan:

Blender Avian model with chicken wings

Aug
22
2015

Contemplating Avian wing sizing...

I can't remember how I came about my original calculations but I worked out that a 1.8m tall (because that's how tall my base model is, no other real reason) Avian should have a 10-12m wingspan.  Because I didn't want to make the wing arms too big (because heavy plus looked stupid past a certain point) I managed to end up with 3m long primaries.

Blender Avian model with 10m wingspan

For comparative purposes one with a 7m wingspan (made the wing arms longer but used the feathers I'd done originally, didn't zoom in for size comparison):

Blender Avian model with 7m wingspan

Aug
19
2015

Avian wing progression

Reasonably weight mapped chicken wings.

Avian Blender model with folded chicken wings

Which I think looks a lot better than the Lightwave model I did five years ago (weight mapping was probably still a work in progress here or at least I hope it was, I can't remember now):

Lightwave Avian model weightmap wip

And now comes with primary, secondary and tertial flight feathers.

Avian Blender model with flight feathers

Aug
13
2015

Rig test 2

Error riddled but I'm calling it done so I can move along with other things.  Like characters and sets and maybe more paintovers.  Least my arm rig works which was the purpose of the exercise!

Aug
12
2015

Calming down

Blender model looking calmer

Amazing what turning on the other two lights can do.  Base is a bit less annoyed now that we've nearly finished a rig test (FINALLY).

Aug
10
2015

Action hero pose

Blender model in beat up action hero recovery pose

This pose kind of just happened shortly after I animated a "yeah...and...?" type shrug, and it reminded me of all the similar types of poses I've seen in movies and various pieces of art around the place, usually where the hero has been beaten to a pulp and is staggering off somewhere or stubbornly staggers back to their feet to eventually kick arse and chew bubble gum.

In other news, the arm rigs seem to work now.

Aug
03
2015

I meant to do that

Blender3d model looking annoyed

Base pretending it's not recovering from a stumble.

 I stuffed up the initial walk timing and with the amount of keying I'd done it was easier to just remove them and try again.  It's getting there.

Jul
30
2015

Science birthday party

One of JJ's friends recently hosted a science themed birthday party for his 7yo, complete with science experiments.

First up was lemon batteries.  They had fun poking various pieces of metal into the lemons and then tried to light a small LED from it.

8yo and 6yo with lemon batteries

Unfortunately the lemons didn' put out enough power to light the LEDs on thi occasion (it had apparently worked when JJ's friend was testing out suitable experiments for the party).  They moved on to the next thing while JJ used a metal coat hanger to skewer some of the lemons into a parallel to see what kind of charge he could get and apparently we'd need quite a lot of lemons to get one small LED to turn on.

Jul
30
2015

Disgruntled

Blender character with angry expression done with shape keys and bone drivers

Screencap of the latest rig test.  Base has had enough :)