AR notes: sculpting horns

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

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

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

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.

I’m not sure if the model in my anatomy book has tiny ears, but if Red’s ears look massive it’s intentional, the Dragonkin inherited large pointy bat-reminiscent ears from the Chiropterans who went extinct a thousand or so years before the timeblock I’m currently working in.

Twisty horns from hell

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 bek's thought process, or one reason why AR is taking an inordinate amount of time to get anywhere

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.

AR notes: physical bitboins

Some people have made them. As far as I can tell from an extremely quick skim, they’re all round coins and bills, familiar looking money.

The current block I’m working in uses local currency and bitcoin for a global currency. While contemplating bitcoin and how it gets accepted/exchanged as readily as the local currency of any given area, I wondered if they had a physical version of it. Which then of course had me wondering how cool it would be if they were dice.

BlenderAdventures Pt 1

That would be Blender the open source 3d application not the kitchen appliance.

2012-06-22: I want to split out the Lightwave viewports and have one view on the big screen so I can see a big picture of what’s going on and work on smaller zoomed in sections on my Cintiq. Lightwave can’t do that. Wonder if Blender can because it’s all open sourcey and whatnot and it’s statistcally improbable that I’m the only person on the planet that would want to do such a ridiculous thing. Find out it can, download. Messed around a little with menus (most important thing was change the rotation thing from turntable to trackball so it would move in a way I was used to) and made a mutant cube.

Sunday lazy sunday

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]

Last night, I was on a roll. I went to bed slightly later than intended.

This morning, 3yo woke me up repeatedly. First, sometime before the sun came up. Then shortly after the sun came up and the blue light was caning my eyes. Then after the sun came up. And shortly after JJ staggered out of bed I did the same seeing as I couldn’t sleep anyway.

Funding, distribution and musings on my sanity (or lack thereof)

Business has been going pretty well. This is great, and it also means I haven’t had a chance to work much on AR. I’ve been proofing and editing the scripts in between banging my head against code and deciphering client requests, and spent a whack of Sunday working on Red, but I’m pretty sure at this stage that I won’t be ready to animate the first ep by the end of the year. I am refusing to have panic attacks about it.