I had spent a decent amount of time regaling 10yo with hilarious episodes of my 3d experimentations revolving around the shenanigans that can happen when one doesn’t parent controllers properly or grabs bones instead of controllers by accident and stuff like that. Then to prove that parents don’t know everything I showed him that I was researching some way to use a complete dynatopo sculpt rather than finishing off the multires one I was working on. While talking to him I started fixing up some errors I hadn’t noticed in the dynatopo sculpt at the time and zoomed out a bit too far, causing a brush stroke to remove too much detail over the bit I brushed over. I cried out “OH CRAP” and promptly hit the undo combo. 10yo came scurrying into the room crying “WAIT I WANT TO SEE YOUR HORRENDOUS MISTAKE!”

This is another one of those rare instances where I post to an external site before the blog. I haven’t had a chance to set up a video thingi yet and am not willing to do it from Christmas Island (internet is tooooooooo slooooooowwwwwwww) so I am attempting to finally try to start getting over the grudge I have against Google over their mind numbingly idiotic real names policy that resulted in the nymwars (to their credit they have seemed to realise how stupid the policy was and how stupid it made them look and are now letting people call themselves whatever, and are now no longer forcing Youtube channels to be attached to G+ pages if you decide you don’t actually want to use your own name, I have decided I seriously can’t be bothered trying to recreate my old ryivhnn channel.

Learning how to texture in Blender. Here we have agonisingly basic skin, lip, eye and teeth shaders (the teeth were so basic that if I’d been using Lightwave I wouldn’t have bothered with nodes but Blender seems to use nodes for anything more complicated than a colour it seems, which is cool). Should hopefully be able to build on them on a per character basis. This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

At 8yo’s request: ‘Make him frown!’ (all the bases are gender neutral) Seeing something mildly disturbing

To get a point that was moved incorrectly for whatever reason in a shape key and needs to be reset to the “Basis” position, from Adhi on StackExchange: Use Blend From Shape: Select all vertices whose positions you want to reset, Execute Blend From Shape, accessible from W, Ctrl-V or Mesh > Vertices menu, Set “Basis” as shape key to blend from (by default), Set blend factor to the maximum value 1.0 (by default), Uncheck Add, so only values from “Basis” will be blended in, effectively reverting all selected vertices’ position. Kind of wish there was a slightly less arseabout way to do it but a way is better than no way.

Still shape keying. Base is partially amused. So far I’ve got all of a left eye wink and a half smile. Once I got the left half smile right and figure out where the eyelashes go I’ll mirror those shape keys and then do some really basic expression parts around happy, sad, angry and surprise which generally use the entire face. Then make some phonemes with help from this useful phoneme shape guide someone had thoughtfully thrown at the internet.

Thought to do a quickie render rather than a screencap of the handstand splits, decided I couldn’t be bothered fixing the lights at this stage so ticked the “Freestyle” box and left it at default everything. It’s pretty cool; I could almost pretend I know how to draw with this. Vaguely related, grease pencil is the most useful thing ever put into a 3d app. This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

fyn can rig, though I’m sure I’m probably doing it horribly wrong. It’s a combination of rigging techniques learned in Lightwave and playing with the Armature modifier, with one tangent into using bendy bones (single bones with multiple segments) for the spine from the head down and then two bendy bones for neck and spine. Had to put one more controller in to flex the spine in the right direction. The neck flexes one way (looking downward) fine but will not flex the other way (it’s jaggy in this pose, effects can be seen if you look carefully at the neck), adding another shape to control the flex like I did with the spine didn’t help and neither did my aforementioned tangent into bendy bones.

Head and torso retopologising in Blender 2.71 Ended up poly modelling after all as Bsurfaces doesn’t work in Blender 2.71. Least it’s not too horrible with the magnet and the correct “snap to” thing on (it’s a picture of a magnet which is greyed out in the above screenies, next to the picture of the cube with one white face close to the bottom of the screen, don’t ask me the names of anything :). Though by “doesn’t work” it appears that it’s missing some buttons, I have no idea if it would continue working after those buttons were reinstated. I could probably read the code if I tried but otherwise don’t know enough python to hack it and apparently no one else that knows what they’re doing uses it enough to fix it. I guess I’ll look into it if I can find some of this mythological spare time stuff. The face loops are doing my head in. And the head is really dense compared to the torso (trying to console myself it’s because heads tend to be round, torsos just curvy and I have smoothing on so what I’ve got looks smooth enough). I’ll have to see if the face loops actually work when I get around to doing morphs (or shape keys, apparently). Hopefully I should be able to retopo sections if I need to as I really, really don’t want to do the inside of the mouth again (I thought last time would be the last time damnit!).

Alternate title: my Blender muscles are atrophying -_- I had a lot of work on the last three weeks and have now slowed down as I put out a call for help a couple of days ago and now waiting on a response. In the meantime I’m slowing down back to normal and getting back into the 3d (no 3d for three weeks make fyn something something). So three weeks ago after stuffing around with the rig I eventually came to the conclusion that the topology around the hips was wrong. After trying and failing to fix it by spinning edges, I decided to just retopo the whole thing because I wasn’t sure about the loops around the face either.