technonaturalist

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AEfter Ragnarok

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QaD render of Za’haran’s face to see how the eyes and lip textures turned out. They’re not terrible, though I think I want to do more with his eyes. Using the Fast Skin shader that ships with Lightwave, which does a pretty good job of making skin look more skin-like than I know how to get it. I added a procedural to break it up as it was entirely too smooth and perfect.

My 3

QAD render to celebrate finishing the bulk of rigging. A couple of tiny little tweaks to make but it’s stuff I can do as I go.

Low enhanced antialiasing, radiosity and Skytracer on default settings (added the thing, checked the cloud boxes).

Think I used too much blue. And yes it looks funny as there are no joint or face morphs. I need more RAM and less OpenGL sliders.

The pose is based off a really old pic of my sister’s as I realised a bit ago that my base models matched up with her fan characters.

Dragonkin completed rig

I’ve spent a good amount of time trying to work out how the hell to do a prehensile tail rig. The last time I did it, it involved a 72 bone multi-goal IK chain.

It kinda hurt.

This time, it involves a 65 bone IKB chain, main direction controlled by the big ball-shaped null object on the end.

I haven’t yet tried to wrap the tail around something but I am stupidly confident.

Avian - completed rig

Showing off the completed rig of the Avian base model.

How high can you fly broken wings?

Weight mapping and adjusting geometry on wings. Still a way to go, obviously.

Rejigging flux

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

[imported from livejournal and backdated]

It’s probably a good thing I’m used to constant flux, it has on occasion driven me mad but I think I need it, considering several attempts to have anything above the most basic of basic routines results in more chaos and me actually going mad. Considering the amount of Stuff going on in my head I’ve decided to relegate logging of the banal crap and reminders to do Stuff to djinn (my iPhone, yes it and both my computers and my car have names and personalities) which seems to have left the part of my brain I’m aware of using more room to do some really weird stuff.

Catchup, Tapfish economics, cartography and Lojban

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

[imported from livejournal and backdated]

[this post got a lot of interesting/amusing comments mostly about people apparently annoyed by my decision to use Lojban as the IAL (international auxiliary language) for AEfter Ragnarok - bit sad to lose them]

Catchup

No posts for a whole year. That might have something to do with being slightly manic with what I calculated was roughly the equivalent of a 24/7/365 on call full time job and two contract/casuals. And I’m only getting paid for one of them, and only if I can find contracts. Sprat and I have gotten down to srs bizness and are now doing design and websites for money, along with the mass plethora of other people doing the same. We’re better than 90% of them ;) I am also still working on AR (formerly referred to as The Comic and then The ComicAnimation, you know, that thing I’ve been plugging at constantly and more or less consistantly for the last 8 years or so). It’s come a long, long way. It’s also because I thought I’d try my hand at this record keeping business. So I (very intermittently) kept records in a Smiggle notebook.

Rig testing and weight mapping

Grabs from a 22 second animation made for the express purposes of testing my rig and making some weight maps.

Head v[x]

Fixed the nose sooner than I thought I would.

Quick render of the subpatched model with the default lighting. Just got the tongue to do, once I figure out the best way to model it.

Buy me a drink first

Zul’jinn jolted internally as Megan seemed to materialise out of the crowd beside them, catching hold of Zara and pulling her close with a playful growl as she attempted to nip the smaller girl’s shoulder. Zara for her part looked completely unsurprised, casually fending off the double grope by catching Megan’s wrists, leaning back against the heart stoppingly beautiful blonde.

“Hey Megs,” she said, her voice coloured with amusement, before spinning out of Megan’s arms and turning to face her. Megan followed up, grabbing Zara’s hips and pulling her close again, this time planting a kiss on the lips.