February ProgBlog #4: making a thing

The sculpt repairs are coming along slowly and painfully but otherwise looking all right.

The areas I've cleaned up have got bigger triangles/more grey area, black bits are super dense mesh.  I did actually do part of the face but from quite close, it was a lot darker than that before.  The blotchy spots are the bits that were giving me grief in 3d Coat.  Sometimes if I go over them enough times with the clean clay brush (doesn't seem to matter what the setting is) they sometimes will eventually separate from the main mesh which will then let me objectify them and delete them when they go to their own layers.  Most of the time all that happens is that holes form in the mesh and I can't always close them and everything gets violently pulled out of shape and then the other side is destroyed.  This is what I get for not working with virtual mirrors (because I keep switching sides because sometimes some things are more comfortable on one side than the other).

I did try to stay on top of the fact that while it's a lot better than it was, Blender still isn't very good at dealing with millions of polys.  However I kept forgetting and focusing on the work and crashed the rig several times.  Eventually I got fed up with it, decided to take a break and went back to animating.

And kept animating, and eventually finished keyframe blocking which was a shock.

So here it is for everyone to laugh at.

I already deviated from my plan (not that anyone remembers what the plan was that I outlined in my last update) because this ended up flowing better.  On the one hand I'm mildly concerned for the shots that are actually planned (with notes and stuff) in the scripts, but on the other hand I'm used to making plans and then merrily dancing off because this one is better (I'm pretty sure J has grown to dread hearing that line XD).

Over the next few days I'll start going back through and doing breakdowns (including some expression change in the close up at the end as she tends to have resting bitch face when training by herself) and then see how I go with physics (haven't done it before) so I can make a decision about whether I'm doing that or rigging everything and doing things the hard way.