June ProgBlog #1: textual feeling

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.

Blue Tanager

I think I did the apple slightly too big, even if it is a little person.

This one is for elviento, who didn’t ask for one but did post some adorable pictures of blue tanagers which I didn’t even know existed. I cowarded out and did a front shot (because I figured the underside of the wings will be plainer than the top because that’s usually how these things seem to roll) because I won’t be able to get the colours of the wings with a sketchy.

May ProgBlog #4: sculpting and scripting

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,

To some value of working

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.

May ProgBlog #2: character roll

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).

SQUIRREL

Running super late with these cameos just like with everything else, I AM SO SORRY x_x

@artwatch requested a black kitten/otter hybrid that was more kitten than otter. I immediately dubbed it “kittotten” and did a couple of initial sketchies, erased them all, started on another, and got distracted for literal months.

Yesterday I finally got back to it (I’ve lost track of days since soft lockdown first started and basically only know when it’s a weekday or a weekend, I am trying to remember to check more often x_x) and after a couple more fails which got scrubbed suddenly ended up with something I could work with.

May ProgBlog #1: nothing to see here folks

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).

April ProgBlog #4: so near and yet so far

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.

April ProgBlog #3: the sleeve bone's connected to the...

Actually the clothes bones aren’t connected to anything.

I had one more go with playing with lattices and bonevelopes for the croptop rig, and then went back to the straight bonevelope rig and added a few more bones and made all the bones smaller and with smaller envelopes, as I had a lot more control over the shape and the twists of those annoying little shoulder straps with the bonevelope rig. It’s holding shape a bit better.

April ProgBlog #2: the sleeps are borked

For once I actually had a good reason about not getting the progblog done on the Friday. 13yo and I spent the entire day making a sign for a birthday driveby. Saturday was the actual driveby and because I’m really smart and hate driving I decided I would rather hike it in 39C because that’s how much I hate driving (it was just down the road). That coupled with drifting back into habits that I’ve had since childhood that not even 12 years of strict bedtimes and wake up times and attempts that always fail despite people screaming at me that it absolutely is just a bad habit and I’m just not trying hard enough, I quite simply work much, much better at night.