December ProgBlog #3: winding down a bit

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.

December ProgBlog #2: not much prog to blog :S

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.

December ProgBlog #1: kerbstomped by silly season

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.

November ProgBlog #5: and we're back

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):

November ProgBlog #4: bugger that density

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).

November ProgBlog #3: dense

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.

November ProgBlog #2: little touchups

Did I mention there was a lot of transitioning going on?

12yo is back homeschooling (kind of forced the issue and pulled her out as while she kept insisting til she was blue in the face that she adored school and absolutely under no circumstances wanted to quit, she refused to go due to being constantly “sick”) so I’ve readjusted all my schedules again, and because I keep staying up late (I just work better at night!) I’ve stuffed up a lot of my own timing.

November ProgBlog #1: Unstuck and into Blender

Alternate title: PROGRESS. I AM MAKING IT.

I still have no idea what the original problem was, but I did manage to work around.

And I managed to work around because painting the normal map in the paint room was hell and I also really, really wanted to solve the other problem.

Because I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, even though I realised the 3d Coat menus were contextual, I didn’t really realise they were contextual. So for a long time it didn’t occur to me that I could export the sculpt mesh. I got there eventually though, and sent it over to Blender to see if I could figure out what was wrong with it.

October ProgBlog #4: stuck (and a minor temper tantrum)

I have made zero progress this week, as the entire thing was spent failing to figure out this problem never mind resolve it.

Basically what’s happened is that every time I go to bake (and it doesn’t seem to matter what baking option I choose, there seems to be a few), the sculpt mesh decides to do this at some point either just before the bake starts or right at the beginning somewhere:

October ProgBlog #3: borked (and partly noteorial)

I couldn’t just fix the polyflow around the shoulders like I was intending. I ended up redoing the entire torso and the hips, butt and connecting part of the thighs.

I don’t know how well it will animate in general but it will be a lot better than how it was. This meant the uv maps had to get redone as well. Then I spent two days trying to figure out how to fix the mess before remembering that 3dC is supposed to be able to deal with stuff like this and looking up how to do that instead.