I’ve always had a great respect for tattoo artists. I may or may not have mentioned the first time I did these tattoos that that respect increased by roughly an order of magnitude because unlike me they don’t have undo buttons. And somehow can make things look good from most angles. I’m really feeling that again. Also despite having had to do it for this version I still don’t understand how people paint from colour blocks.

I did the scars as a bump map using bpainter. Then figured out how to string normal and bump nodes so that everything would go in nicely. Normal map texture colour out plugs in to colour in of normal map node. Normal socket out of normal map node plugs into normal in of bump map node.

The rework continues. I finished sculpting (it was the digits that took the longest again, all 10 of them because I was working in mirror mode so the other 10 on the other side were getting done simultaneously) and baked the normal map. The first time it was yellow apparently because I didn’t use a cage. I don’t know why one was needed but apparently it was a thing that was needed so I checked that box but got it to extrapolate 1mm or 1cm (can’t remember which) rather than making a cage mesh like I did with Red. That one came out blue/purple/pinkish like it was supposed to.

I’d finished the reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeetopo by the end of the last progblog and was working on transferring the texture maps. Only something went kind of horribly wrong and things were getting transferred oddly (I could see the shapes but they weren’t where they were meant to be). I eventually decided to just redo the sculpt and after a moment of confused panic as it’s backwards to how I was starting to normally do things (sculpt, retopo, bake) and I was trying to be careful of the shape of the original mesh, when it entered my thick skull that I can just shrinkwrap the base mesh, and nuts I went.

I managed to take care of the thing I needed to take care of. Dealt with most of the brain post-processing yesterday but it feels like there’s still some subconscious resisual doing stuff so it’s probably going to occupy brain space for a little while more. But at least it’s not weighing down everything. The progblog ended up being late again mostly because of that (could not concentrate enough even when I didn’t have to deal directly with the external problems) and I figured I could get an appreciable amount done on the Sunday (today) which I’d dedicated as an art day to recover.

There’s been a few sucky days and it’s basically not going to improve until I can get one specific task out of the way and I’m getting seriously annoyed with the blocker. Once done I’m not dealing with it again. On the bright side, there has been a number of great days (if busy) because my parents are up, so everything is generally going to be great once this mess is over and done with.

The problem with hands, is that I keep ending up with a Moebius strip despite my best efforts. (this is not technically a Moebius strip, it’s just the same feeling I get when you’re tracing one; for the Home Edders, Moebius strips are a fun activity, get the kids to cut out a strip of paper, half-twist one end, tape the ends together and tell them to draw a line on either the inside or the outside but not both)

I’m not sure if the rererererereretopo (I have no idea anymore) is any better than the previous one. Probably a bit hard to see the original wireframe in black under the new white wireframe. My current problem is trying to work out how to connect the arms and if there’s enough polys there. I love the Contours tool. I love all the tools. Have I mentioned how much less horrible Retopoflow makes retopology XD

That was literally what @holoz0r asked for. I’m terrible at facial hair so… I made a bearded dragon x_x I think it evolved the crazy tail for prey trapping purposes. Also tried out using the tilted pencil brush as @veryspider apparently liked using it quite a lot. I can kind of see why but unlike some people I can’t draw.

There is a snap 3 day lockdown which my parents have arrived just in time for, and my newfound problems with the snapping tool in Blender. I’m mildly annoyed about it because I won’t be able to train or go see my parents over the weekend. I’ve gotten onto retopologising Zara. I know I said I wanted to animate first but I realised when I was rigging Red that I’d stuffed up some bits in the rig so needed to rerig Zara anyway and figured I may as well retopo and rebake seeing as I have to rerig.