November ProgBlog #1: neverending story

It’s one of those time periods that has been happening more and more lately, where I’ve been feeling slightly melancholy about being another one of those failures that didn’t make it and not from lack of trying.

October ProgBlog #1: hairy frustrations

haaaaaaaaaaaaair

Now that I’ve got a hang of it, this bit is going pretty well and relatively quickly (and is also somewhat meditative at best and mind numbingly, agonisingly tedious at worst).

I feel like this is probably a bit overkill but it is mostly working. The first few times I was doing test renders I couldn’t work out why the lighting was so weird and eventually cottoned on to the hairs being too thick. Once that was fixed it looked a lot better but this other problem that I have persisted and that’s a flare I don’t fully understand happening at some point in the render.

September ProgBlog #1: learning more hair

Rigify feels a lot easier to work with. Got that going faster than I’m used to, most of the fighting in the setup was not quite understanding how to set up a spline tentacle (which I’m using for the tail), for some reason I thought the entire bone chain needed to have the property set but only the root did. It currently has five middle controllers but I may need more, will have to see how prehensile we get with what I’ve got. And also making sure all the bones were in the right spot after I had to move a few things around to fit the mesh.

August ProgBlog #1: the fun part

This was supposed to be the last July ProgBlog but comp season started (that goes for a couple of months of very intense weekends) and then I got a bad chest infection (bastard thing broke my perfect attendance record, I stormed back to work the next day though I probably shouldn’t have and it took its usual 2-3 weeks to bugger off) and then my parents came to town for a visit, so it’s now the first and possibly last August ProgBlog (because comps on days I normally project work and no other day I can sub).

July Progblog #3: passing go

I am fighting an epic battle for my life against my overwhelming desire to scrap this and try again because the topology isn’t quite right and I’m getting lumps when sculpting.

It looks and sculpts/adjusts fine with multires so it will work fine.

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

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.

July ProgBlog #1: when you're not as far as you think you are

I was so happy when I made the female Dragonkin model as I thought I was finally done. I went to make a new file to start (re)making Red when I suddenly realised…forgot the retractable claws.

Ergh.

And then I realised I’d put the tail too high up the back and that the base was too thin.

More ergh.

I spent a few good hours sulking.

Then got back into it. On the bright side there’s always dodgy looking things that crop up when modelling.

June ProgBlog #5: almost there

Remembering things is quicker than learning things from scratch, but I still hate uv mapping.

I’m also so very tired and so very glad that I made a very early decision to never pitch this thing given the amount of hate 3d gets. If I’d been doing it for anyone other than myself I would have probably given up long ago.

June Progblog #4: finishing things is weird

Another late start today as I had a bit of laundry to do (though I did get eldest to get it off the line for me in the evening as I found outside too cold) and also spent a bit too much time catching random episodes of Demon Slayer (article contains spoilers) with 17yo who was recovering from a head cold.

But at least the hands are done.

Connecting the wings to the body was a bit tricky but got there eventually and didn’t take as long as I thought it would. What took longer (and pushed me past bedtime again) was deciding I needed to do the wing membrane texture RIGHT NOW because I don’t even know why anymore.

June ProgBlog #3: closing

Closing meshes is on the long list of things I hate.

Okay I don’t actually feel strongly enough to hate it, but it is annoying when things don’t just close nicely.

The last membrane and finger went pretty quickly and smoothly, which somewhat made up for the super late start caused by house discussions. At least I was able to get some work done, we had been going to turn the power out so that some cabling could safely go into the roof.