technonaturalist

On Tuesday I posted this screenie of Zara in showoff pose on ko-fi

and that’s where I’m still currently stuck while the next few moves work themselves out in my head.

It was a good excuse to jump back to Red and redo the retopo. My edge loops are probably not the best right now but they were a lot worse on my original retopo, no wonder I was having so much trouble with deformations. Not to mention it was probably a lot heavier than it should have been. Having said that it was kind of an experiment in seeing if I could get high poly to work and I’m not smart enough so I’ll stick with mid poly and subdivision surfaces. And fix all the edge loops while I’m about it because there was no coming back from that one.

I thought I was pretty much done with Zara aside from wardrobe (which I can build out as I proceed through scripts) when I remembered that the goggles are an essential piece of kit as she’s blind in the light without them.

Then I spent way too long staring at her for a bit before sending a screenie to Sprat asking if the eyes were too far apart. She confirmed that they were and that I should also maybe move the mouth up a tiny bit. So I did.

Last night was an exercise in frustration. There was a bunch of chores to finish up, and then all I wanted to do was some art and to hopefully get the progblog knocked out before it got too late.

Instead of spending a couple of hours being able to work solidly after putting youngest to bed (the two bigs had gone off on yet another sleepover), I ended up fiddling around with the material for Zara’s eyes in an attempt to make them reflective for maybe half an hour to an hour, and then the rest of the time trying to recover/work with one crash that happened during a test render (which is extremely inconvenient given this is what I got the rig for but sadly not that unusual) and a weird drama where the keyboard and mouse stopped being useful (both mouse and stylus would move the cursor but clicks were ignored, and all input keyboard was ignored except for switching terminals, and then it would work perfectly fine in another terminal) that resulted in me downing tools for the night (angrily hard shutting down the rig and leaving it off overnight which I don’t recall ever doing before).

Or: why fyn has a ridiculously comprehensive and detailed head universe.

Like all good stories, it started off innocently enough. I finished eyebrows and eyelashes and did some super quickie expression tests:

My lights are really close and pretty bright hence the intense reflection, if they’re still too reflective under normal lighting conditions I’ll have to fiddle with the node a bit more.

Everything kind of completely fell apart in October. 12yo had caught everything under the sun in Term 3 and so had missed a fair chunk of it. At the beginning of Term 4 she continued insisting that she loved school and still wanted to go, but two weeks in I could count on one hand the number of times she had actually gone. She kept insisting she was “sick” or “too tired” but would always be better just in time for gymnastics. Things eventually came to a head when we had a massive blowout as I told her if she was really that sick then she was not going to gymnastics so she could recover properly and she told me to pull her out of school so she could go to gym (a threat I’d made a few times previously but hadn’t done because I give too many chances). I tried to get her to be reasonable and told her she could go to gym, and then she had to go to school for the rest of the week. If she wanted to quit after that she was to tell me on the weekend and I could pull her out and she could go back to homeschooling, if she wanted to keep going then she had better have as close to a perfect attendance as possible for the rest of the term, and if she didn’t go the following day then I was pulling her out that day.

I was optimistic and tried but as expected it took me longer to ease back in than I wanted.

And then I injured my right thumb cleaning the stove and had a couple of days where holding the pen was painful (but towards the end of Day 0 and yesterday I tried anyway, today was better).

Currently working on trying to get Zara’s hair sorted. Took me a bit to remember how to x-mirror around the 3d cursor and even then because I hadn’t applied the transforms to the curves the mirrored copies were wonkered. Which was fine as I only wanted the same number of guides on both sides and didn’t want the hairstyle to be symmetrical, but it’s a bit of work adjusting.

Even though we haven’t gone away this Christmas and are only doing a couple of gatherings, I’ve still managed to completely fail to get anything worthwhile done when I have been able to do anything. Last night I fell into a pit and after my computer decided to randomly crash (again) and I had to redo a whole pile of work, I ended up not even attempting the progblog and just crawling into bed to sulk.

Most of this week has been taken up doing last second Christmas-related stuff that I’d forgotten (I’m pretty sure this is the first year I thought I better do a list for next year, in my defence it’s the first time I’ve had to keep track of enough people to require a list), so work fell by the wayside a little bit.

I managed to start on the hair and rig the crest.

I shall do my utmost to keep up but this year silly season is seriously kerbstomping me x_x

And I don’t think staying up late is helping that much but it feels like it is.

We seem to be rigging all right, I did some big motions with limbs and turned her into a pretzel and here I was playing around with small expressions.

Split the panels just so I could show the non-animators among us the puppet controls and the result.

What is this 5 weeks shenanigans.

So pretty much trying to pick up where I was before I jumped back to do more retopo. That texture baking tool in 3dC is a lifesaver when you’re inept like me x_x The skin texture is now reasonable enough for in your face shots:

And an in your face Eevee render as close as the clipping distance would let me get (I’m not even sure I have many if any extreme closeups like this):