technonaturalist

And by “gotten away with it” I mean “finished” and by “dog” I mean “dogs and cats” XD

I’ve spent this entire week ironing the tail. Also found this helpful setting

and turned it on after actually reading the tooltip while wondering what it did. I’d been thinking it would be helpful in high poly situations like this if stuff could just be rendered when it was actually in the viewport and smarter people than me obviously thought it would be a good idea too XD

I decided to go in a different direction and after getting past the face I reduced some polygons down the back and went onto the tail. I’d kind of moved the base part down the back in 3dC so it was pretty much attached to the butt like it would be in a quadruped which looks more awkward in a biped but that’s what they’re all going to be like and their body structures are somewhat unlikely anyway.

That’s what Blender sculpt mode feels like at the moment.

I don’t know whether it’s because I found some settings that make me happy or whether I finally got the polycount down to something Blender is happier with (got it down to 3.5M from 3.7M after I decided to reduce the polycount in the wing membranes using super light dabs with the clay brush and it’s been jumping mostly down as I continue reworking things and Blender remeshes everything I touch) or whether something has been going on under the hood as I swear every time Manjaro does a system update there’s a new version of Blender in there somewhere (this may or may not be a slight exaggeration).

What do you mean that’s reminding you of a song? XD

I’ve been bouncing between working on the sculpt to try to have something interesting and visual for the progblog because people in general seem to prefer pretty pictures (guess it’s much easier to glance, upvote and keep scrolling than actually have to read? XD), but sadly there is still a metric boatload of work nobody is ever going to see or even realise exists to get done as well.

I have no real excuse for the late progblog this time. I just forgot it was Friday yesterday and was merrily sculpting away til late. Fixing sculpts isn’t quite as fun as just making them but I definitely find it more fun than trying to work out retopo or rigging or cloth sim shenanigans.

On the hand the denser bits are the bits I haven’t touched yet, though on the thumb there are just denser bits as I moved in closer (I have both dynatopo and remesh on, controlled by brush detail which seems to be based off however big the brush is). I’m fixing up a lot of shapes (the fingers of both Red and Zara are really spindly) and I’m not looking forward to fixing up Red’s tail (at least I can move it down relatively easily in Blender though it will probably chug). I can get the mesh a lot smoother than I could in 3d-Coat (it’s still unknown why the mesh was persistently lumpy in 3dC, with or without dynatopo/liveclay, and apparently nobody else knows either) which is the main critically important thing for me at the moment as I’m using the sculpt for normal maps as well as shape and I only want some textures appearing in the normal maps, such as scars and the horn patterning. Skin textures are getting done with materials,

Please excuse the slight headache that is the abrupt camera movement towards the end (and maybe don’t watch it if you get motion sick easily ^_^;), I only half-arsed fixed a lot of things after changing the framerate from 24 to 60. There are so many things I need to fix. Including I forgot to turn the arm socks collection back on (I could have sworn I had) but I’m not rerendering this just for that, so you can instead see why she usually wears arm socks. And just not bothering with the hair collisions after a while because this was supposed to be a thing to work out clothes rigging. If this was an actual thing I would have obsessed over it a lot longer.

Progblog is actually late because I decided to combine it with a Blender notes and it took the better part of forever x_x

Make a collider. Some people do it by decimating a copy of the character. I made one by my old Blender retopo method of edge modelling with mirror and shrinkwrap modifiers (which took way, way, way longer than it should have because I kept stopping, procrastinating and whining all the way through it, much like my children with the much hated bookwork) and remembered why I bought 3d Coat. I did that rather than decimating so the collider would have no facial features aside from hints of eye sockets and a nose bump, and no digits, so it could be super low poly and the right shape (this one is not really super low as the head and hands are a bit dense).

There’s really not a lot of prog to blog as I’m well and truly stuck again. Very slowly doing the step by step caching physics thing to frame 0 (something keeps going wrong and making me have to start again and it’s not fun for anyone) which is exactly what I was doing last week.

@rainite asked me about my characters on Discord and I said I’d done a few and would so a summary post for them, and figured I may as well chuck it in this progblog because it’s kind of prog (just over a longer period than a week) rather than making a separate summary post (which feels like cheating because I’ve posted all of these pics before, if it’s in a progblog as a progress thing it feels slightly less like cheating even though it’s basically the same thing, see it’s this kind of logic that allows people to justify idiocy).

Not a lot has changed since last week. I did some experiments with the hair, trying to get some better (or any in the case of some child hairs which I suspect from reading around don’t acknowledge physics anyway) collisions with the goggle strap. None of them were successful, so I complained to my little artbees that I would just have to wait til Blender dropped its hair update. Then @rainite (who keeps on top of these things unlike some fyns who shall remain nameless) sent a link that indicated that the physics update (which includes hair) will be along later this month so I’ll worry about it then (and hopefully will have this one out of the way and be onto the next thing by the time it drops so I can play with it in the next one) and just get it baked (I’m getting stymied by having to manually step through -120 to 0 before I can hit space and do other things while it steps itself through and hopefully doesn’t crash, but I’m now saving the cache to disk as I think it crashed last time).

With money being an annoying thing, I’ve moved all of my websites to a local server (that’s sitting on my desk, it’s tiny and adorable), which means it will probably be a bit slower for everyone (though Sprat reckons it’s not too bad and the internet isn’t the greatest on Christmas Island). I also finally got colorbox working with help from a module that extends CKEditor’s link plugin giving it some “advanced” options like the ability to add classes, so you, dear reader, will now be able to click on images to make them much moar biggerer (assuming of course I remember to actually do the extra step to make them so ^_^;). Unfortunately it doesn’t work retroactively so it will only be posts from this one onward.