technonaturalist

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):

After getting increasingly annoyed about how dense the mesh was becoming as well as general annoyance about having to do yet more rework and the fact that some things simply didn’t want to stay square, I threw that idea through a brick wall and decided to just extrude the nails like I was originally planning and hope it wouldn’t make a mess.

Which meant first trying to get used to the extrude tool (press enter first, then move it, then switch tools because pressing enter again doesn’t drop it, I don’t even remember which program that habit came from).

Comp season is one of our quieter periods and between that and juggling school transportation and crammed work days we got even less done than usual. I was going to put together a compilation video of all the routines but some combination of my phone and computer has been giving me an inordinate amount of trouble has made getting photos and videos off it way harder than it should be in this day and age and I’ve given up on that for now. That is one of the main reasons why I’m so horribly behind on hs misc.

That’s what the head is at the moment and I’m not even done.

Wait what haven’t I done this already? Well yes I had, but while I was working on the skin shader and trying to work out if you can keyframe changes in nodes (which I’ll need for the procedural eye texture, and apparently yes you can though I will have to figure out how) I realised I should probably do fingernail and claw procedurals as well so I don’t have to keep repainting them each character, so I jumped back into 3dC to add actual geometry for the finger and toe nails, as previously they were being done entirely with normal mapping.