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).

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…

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).

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!

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

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 :)