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.

It’s moving at a frightening pace for me as I’m used to doing everything with excruciating slowness. I love bsurfaces. It is quite literally the thing that had me giving Blender a go again at that point (previously my Blender attempts were for a couple of weeks once or twice a year, end of last year was a last ditch “this thing is cool so why not let’s try it again” and that’s when I got it).

More Lightwave and Blender comparison I was having a bad day yesterday and irritated because I couldn’t figure out Blender stuff quickly (on the bright side, thanks to Lightwave I at least have an idea of what I’m looking up) and told JJ that Blender was frustrating me and it was tempting to jump back into Lightwave but I didn’t want to give up yet because Blender had some stuff that Lightwave didn’t have like lattice deformation.

And as I said “done” and took and saved the screenshot, I went and made the knees less prominent. Roughly a month (~4 weeks) rather than one year which is much more betterer. And now to Blender to retopo, add the tail blade (well kind of a paddle in his case) and the wing membranes, and texture and rig. This might be the first one I do in Blender as I haven’t done any more work on Twilight since finishing the subdivision. I don’t think it will mind too much. I am being optimistic thinking everything will just fall into place nicely and work, but I am really glad I can fall back to Lightwave if things get too maddening.

I had Quadrapop over earlier today and she was looking over my shoulder and critting the work I’d done on Red’s hands so far. I am aware the hand is the wrong shape and was planning on fixing that in Lightwave where I have poly modelling tools but after receiving the second degree I got motivated enough to attempt it in Sculptris (after firing up Lightwave and fixing the hands on the base models and putting the legs in Da Vinci pose while I was about it).

I had thought maybe I shouldn’t post any more 3d stuff til I got to render stage, but then I optimistically decided that some people might like seeing the build in progress, and those that don’t can just ignore them til there’s something pretty. So here’s a shot of the mostly completed face with the wireframe turned on so show off how well Sculptris retopos the mesh and the dynamic topography (the dense spots on the arms are accidental touches).