technonaturalist

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August ProgBlog #2: back to the grind

posted on: Saturday, 8 August 2020 @ 3:32pm in
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This is a really boring phase where things are super slow going but they need to be done to keep me happy.

still sculpting in Blender 2.8

Other people obsess about mesh smoothness and stuff in obscure places like the soles of feet right?

Yes I’m aware the tail is still a bit of a mess, seems like I’m going to have to edit the normal map for that one -_-

I’m kind of mostly trying to repair shapes but also seem to create a hell of a lot of dents before it will smooth out. I don’t know why that is. I guess the autosmooth gets confused sometimes.

forever sculpting

I’m also having to fight off the compulsion to reduce the polycount for the sake of reducing the polycount which is one of the reasons why the wireframe is only on sometimes (when I’m trying to figure out why something is insistently remaining rough or a weird shape, it’s usually because some polygons refuse to rake or reform so brush needs to change size) as most of what I’m trying to do is correct shape and smooth things out.

sculpting in Blender showing where there's too much of a difference in tris

Having the studio lighting option now is incredibly useful as I remember only using the light setup I’d had when I was first playing with dynatopo in Blender a hundred million years ago and it got me into a hell of a lot of trouble (my weird light setup made for weird shadows and whatnot which made me not notice when things were too high or too deep and then I somehow managed to tear the mesh but it was before the viewport refactor which meant switching into edit mode basically made Blender completely unusable).

I still can’t believe how nice sculpting feels now (even with the annoyances of the bumps that sometimes either won’t go away no matter what or take forever to go away for whatever reason), even though I’m starting to get to the stage of wishing I could hurry up and finish it as I want to get onto the next stage and try out my new retopo toy.