AEfter Ragnarok
You know how I said those horns were done...?
Sunday, 27 October 2013 @ 12:01am
Well, the mesh borked so terribly that I figured I would probably spend about as much time fixing it as I would starting over, so I started over.
Well I was wrong.
The last version of the horns took me about 8 months all up. I don’t want to know how long I would have taken to eventually fix the mesh as I know I spent a good week or so experimenting. Starting over this version took me…
AR notes: conscript to go with the conlang
Thursday, 17 October 2013 @ 1:13pm
Once upon a time I decided to pick Lojban as AR’s international auxiliary language because it was not Euro-specific and hadn’t been created for someone else’s work of fiction (not that there’s anything wrong with those things, I just wanted something international that was actually “international” and I didn’t want to poach someone else’s conlang that had been done for their thing, but one that was constructed just for fun/to use was okay :P). I was also rather lazy had lots of stuff to think about and Lojban had the easiest alphabet to deal with (ascii which is not exactly “neutral” but is a standard).
Calling horns done
Wednesday, 18 September 2013 @ 10:31am
Though I’m sure I’ll find more things to clean up and refine while I’m doing the rest of the body.
Anyway I tried to reflect nature somewhat with some horizontal bands like what’s found in kudu (what I based Red’s horns off):
Horizontal banding - can’t make it look twisty enough!
Sculpty goodness and pipeline change
Tuesday, 20 August 2013 @ 9:10pm
While sculpting horns I was quite sure I was going to use Blender for all the sculpty goodness seeing as it had actually imported the mesh to begin with. I think I’m going to have to accept the fact that my brain is never going to play nicely with Blender because even though I have been doing so much better than I ever have, I still don’t understand it.
Very roughly positioned front, side and three-quarter view of the character in a window on the 21in monitor. The actual work was being done on the Cintiq at close range. The multiscreening is one seriously cool thing about Blender and I do miss it a little bit in Sculptris
AR notes: sculpting horns
Monday, 29 July 2013 @ 10:39am
I got stuck in “after I finish this bit” loop again when I thought about taking screenshots.
Repairing the twists in the horns (following the spline guides mostly worked though near the top some of the twist is wrong and is being corrected) and rounding out some bits that are too thin (and that I couldn’t see as a problem when I was doing the spline guides because there were a billion guides, and only noticed as I was edging upwards). Also making the ridges and whatnot more prominent and varied so it looks more organic (hopefully) and less plastic. I was originally intending on making the horn ridges bump maps rather than geometry, and will have to see how I go on the other characters but I have a feeling it’s going to look better as geometry so will just bite the render time seeing as I’m not making a game :)
Working the torso
Thursday, 6 June 2013 @ 5:04pm
So I’m hideously slow on WiP shots. Part of it is because I’m feeling a distinct pointlessness in them (there are many characters and whatnot to come) and most of it is simply because I keep putting off taking the screenshot when I think about it, and then eventually forget.
Every now and again though I need to remind myself I’m making progress. Here I’ve hidden the wing membranes so I can see what I’m doing, and left a point highlighted so that the close up pane makes some semblance of sense. Done some work on the arms but not a lot, none on the legs, focusing on the torso and pretty much making up the anatomy where the wings are attached as I go.
Studio fyn
Thursday, 9 May 2013 @ 7:22pm
My loving husband has told me on many occasions that I’m certifiably insane. While not exclusively so a lot of it has to do with the whole trying to be a studio around homeschooling, webmonkeying, being the one at home so having to manage the house and all the associated miscellany.
Recently I decided to muck around with something or other (precisely what escapes me now) and while doing so I inadvertantly discovered that the rig I had built in Lightwave 8 or 9 and dragged through 10 to 11 had blown up. Not sure what happened but it’s no longer working. I was a little peeved, but happy to discover after a bit of mucking around to find out how it works, it should only take me a few hours or at least under a week with Genoma, hopefully (allowing for numerous crashes as Genoma on Mac is buggy or at least memory leaky).
Ear wip
Sunday, 28 April 2013 @ 2:33pm
Good enough for now, I’m sure I’ll fiddle with it more as I go. Was going to post a much earlier wip and of course it was “after I fix this, and do this bit, and what the hell is that, and…” now it’s mostly done.
Twisty horns from hell
Saturday, 6 April 2013 @ 9:52am
I’m really glad I’m doing Red first. After spending six months of manual labour on his horns (because I have no idea how to magically make it work) the other characters (none of which have horns that twist this violently) will seem rapid by comparison.
I also don’t think I’m going to forget to model the subpatch cage as close as I can before freezing. Fortunately for me Red’s body structure is not too dissimilar in proportion from the default Dragonkin’s, I did end up spending a lot of time on his face trying to get his nose and chin right.
Quickie insight into fyn's thought process, or one reason why AR is taking an inordinate amount of time to get anywhere
Saturday, 16 February 2013 @ 1:21pm
I have a “family tree” in MacFamilyTree which contains a lot of family saplings as it contains every named major and minor character and several unnamed but otherwise important ones (such as parents of siblings, as you need to list parents to be able to link people up as siblings). The main part of the family tree seems to be tracing The Art from Taha’ne through Ter’wyn down to My’rai (currently the last descendant on the list, the character is about 8-10 in my head in his current state and I also have an idea of him as a teenager but only have snippets of story for him) which is rather entertaining as there is 1723 years between them. That’s a lot of characters even given that the Dragonkin live an average of 120 years.