April ProgBlog #1

I still haven’t worked out whether it’s better to keep a regular update even if it’s “I’m an idiot and got stuck again” or just not say anything if I’m that stuck.

So after combing the hair into the right shape, I found out a few things.

• while the collision detection works really nicely in particle edit mode, it completely fails when actual physics is applied, because for whatever reason the emitter collision is completely ignored
• I can’t work out for the life of me how the hell to rig particle hair

I’ve done spline IK for the tail rig so was trying to do something similar with the hair but don’t understand how particle weights work. Wasn’t the biggest leap to find out about curve guides, and then took me the better part of forever to work out that curve guides had to be on the same layer as the particle emitter to work. Once that was sorted out, I then spent way too long playing around with the different curve types to work out which one would be the best for the job. Seems that nurbs animates quickest so that’s what I’m using.

AER crowd character: LordHyena

Hyenas tend to be punks or warriors or punk warriors and I was pretty tempted but nope because it’s LORD Nigel, that called for a civil, classy hyena.

He may end up with ear piercings down the line.

This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

February Homeschooling Miscellany

The month kicked off with 9yo deciding to make his own “card game” after ages of playing Magic and Yu-Gi-Oh. After quick playtests with me and 11yo, 11yo decided to help make even more “cards”. I use the term loosely bcause the “cards” were all A4-sized.

The game was fairly simple and entertaining, and after playing a couple of times 9yo decided that he probably needed more “good” cards as it didn’t take very long for me to die despite the lives and death prevention things that had been added in the iteration with 11yo.

March ProgBlog #3

Last week was working on pants and boots (and getting to use some fabric normals and a leather material some kind souls made available on Blendswap):

trying to wrangle the hair into several hair ties (it was supposed to be tied with a cord but I finally got it through my thick skull that it wouldn’t stay, even when I did have long hair I didn’t do anything interesting with it, so I’m going to claim total stupidity ignorance and too much anime on my part there!):

AER March ProgBlog #2

Currently all about hair and pants.

I did the pants first to procrastinate the hair.

They do actually have a pattern but I turned down the lights so the skin wouldn’t be so overblown, so it’s something that will be noticed in bright light. Otherwise they look like…black pants. I was thinking of using velcro for the trail strap but may end up just making it an elastic loop as maybe in the future there will be little nano thingies in the clothes that automatically repair fraying clothing so the elastic doesn’t give out.

AER March ProgBlog #1

Lame excuse: I haven’t done a progblog forever because I got well and truly stuck redoing the prehensile tail rig, but I think I’ve fixed it now, and made it work (to some value of work) with the pitchipoy rig (the spline and its controllers are actually on their own rig, but the spline controllers are copying the location of some controllers that are on the pitchipoy rig with additional thingies to keep them from moving too far from each other, feels a bit convoluted but it works).

Maybe specify the action (nsfw inside)

jedau requested an “action shot” of Aurelius. It may have also been a pencil sketch request but I was doing so many scribbly pen coloured ones I kind of got carried away. Oops :S

The nsfw one was actually the first one to jump into my gutter mind but after joking about it while trying to work out what kind of action shot Jed had in mind, I said I didn’t think I was ready for another one yet, and turned my attention to the first one.

AER crowd character: BMJbok

Alternate title: Basketbok.

Why yes I can actually do portraits in portrait. It just required flipping numbers in my render settings and I am nothing if not incredibly lazy.

Everything that is remotely to do with a springbok now has the suffix -bok. And bmj and jackmiller managed to replace a well known and widely used cuss word with “bok” as well which made for an amusing conversation.

Perhaps I should have done a rugby ball but basketball got stuck in my head as nathanmj is mad keen about it and I vaguely recall bmj saying something about coaching but I don’t know if the two ideas were actually related. I think this guy is almost a treebok and not just because of the horns or the different picture orientation. Reckon he’ll just about stand eye to eye with some of my taller Dragonkin.

AER crowd character: DollaGoat

Sorry dolla, you’re now a goat XD (but let me know if you’d rather be something else)

I really wanted to do a variation of the upgoat footer for his Bounce upgoats, and “wall-running upgoat” was a concept firmly embedded in my mind…pretty much since then. And this was how that ended up.

I’m currently not sure whether the eye markings are staying or whether they’ll go and the nose marking will get bigger.

AER crowd character: Pineapple Angel

I have long nicknamed whatamidoing “pineapple” due to the avatar, and when I put out the call to see who wanted to make cameos as crowd character we were bantering back and forth about how I was going to do theirs a pineapple hairdo and they responded back something along the lines of “pineapple angel”, which meant as far as I was concerned a fruity Avian.

There’s no pineapple coloured birds that I’m aware of so I went with something parrotish and a crested eagle crest (actual feathers on the crest rather than the fine silky feathers that’s more common for Avians).