July Progblog #2: at least this repeat work is mostly fun

• AEfter Ragnarok

I finally finished the Dragonkin models (there was some jiggery pokery with the uv maps after I’d finished the claws) and restarted Red.

It was supposed to be a simple case of append the male Dragonkin model, append all the materials I’d already done, do the horns, do the multires sculpt.

It was not a simple case.

I redid the shaders, backported some of the modifications made (knocking out some extraneous colour nodes and adding in some forgotten bump nodes, good thing I can run multiple Blenders) and then started working on the horns.

I really, really, really hate this method of modelling but it was either this or doing a dynatopo sculpt and retopologising that and it’s about the same layer of hate. I prrobably should have just watched the stupid video tutorials on rail extrusion in Blender but I’m in one of those moods.

I’m currently jumping back and forth between extruding and trying to roughly position things where I need them in edit mode and then shaping in sculpt mode.

It’s mostly working out I think. Aside from the inevitable tangles (I really should know to be more careful when I’m shifting up and down sculpt levels…or better yet just stay on the highest one).

At least these ones aren’t too hard to get out.

I should also probably re-enable Sculpt Layers.

And given how much fun I’m having I think I’m going to continue texturing and sculpting kind of as I go, I don’t know why I like watching the procedurals swirl around as I do things.

I’m really glad there’s only one other character with twisty horns from hell and he doesn’t appear til the end.

And then the critical error I made when I wanted to finish up was to “just do a quick render” so I could show off how the horns were going (like with everything else they really should have been done by today but my brain decided that I don’t deserve to have any fun and refused to cooperate again).

So of course snapping to symmetry to fix the parts of the horns that had gone awry from sculpting (which happens occasionally especially when working in thin areas) broke it (I don’t know why it causes polygons to just vanish occasionally) which needed resymmetrising (which replaces the missing polygons if you mirror the correct way) and then merging points and then selecting the offendinng points and snapping to symmetry again.

And then I had to fiddle with the single point light forever.

But I am nothing if not stubborn.

Please excuse the partial sculpt, I started and then decided I should do the horns first.

As with last week I ended up at work a lot trying to finish some wall “murals” (term used loosely as they’re just silhouettes in case I didn’t mention that last time). Unsurprisingly I completely failed to get them done; I really, really, REALLY wanted to have them painted up before term went back in, but there was a bunch of shenanigans that made getting the drawings on the wall a very long and drawn out process and then when I was done it turned out that they couldn’t get the paint for me because the person who was meant to be getting the paints got called away to deal with something else.

Aside from one more drawing which is going to get done last because it requires a ladder and a bit of effort, I’m not sure how I’m going to finish it now, I just know that I’m not going to wait til next school holidays as I’ve already masked some of the drawings and the tape will go stupid if left on for too long.

I’m still waiting for that mythical time when I will have more time to throw into this thing.

This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License