art
Biker Mice from Mars FC: Brandt Maverick
I needed a break from feathering, Midnight had just rolled out a concept of a new character, he was such a prettyboy and I’d wanted to see how my colouring looked on her drawing style. The timing was perfect. Brandt Maverick belongs to Midnight, this pic was coloured with permission. Character is still under heavy development and may not look the same once she’s done with him :) This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.
Saccharine
No drabble this time round, sorry, brain is occupied with other things :) So there we were, chatting on Skype, when Midnight21 linked me to a picture on dA which I will not go look for as it was not safe for prudes (there were two guys, one was sitting up reading, the other crled against him, but you couldn’t see his head so he could have been doing anything) and said she could imagine Helios and Sunkiss doing that, as Helios would probably enjoy reading his books to Sunkiss (the guy’s a decent writer as well as a brilliant artist).
Blender notes: extremely basic hair
When I did the head hair I did a scalp (copy of the…uh…scalp on the top of the head where the hair is growing out of shrunk down to fit just inside the head) with its own material to colour the hair strands because it was the easiest thing to do as the hair strands pick up whatever texture is applied to the geometry. Wasn’t too crazy about the extra geometry but couldn’t work out how everyone else on the planet had done it so crashed around the particle system and node tree til I got something going.
3d-fyn hair progression
I have no idea what I’m doing (despite reading the internet). I had to redo the hair emitters about a million times because I kept blowing something up (and not knowing what I blew up, but combing strands in Particle Mode is kind of amusing for a while). When I finally got that sorted my first test looked like a polyp colony. When I eventually got something I liked I couldn’t work out how to get the red (which is actually supposed to be bleached but I just grabbed a random high constrasting colour at the time) to just be on the mohawk (probably needed a uv map) and then the fuzz on the side was playing silly buggers.
3d-fyn work in progress shots
When I’m not finding UV mapping agonisingly quirky, I’m being frustrated by Blender’s borderline unusable viewport lagginess at 2.2M polys. There is some progress being made. UV mapping was interesting as I couldn’t figure out how to project onto part of a mesh like I’ve done previously in Lightwave so I ended up mapping the entire object om question. For the shirt I just painted the whole thing and ued minimal nodes for colour and bump maps.
Lay it on me
Stoker is going to spit chips. That was the last fully formed logical thought in Helios’ mind as he watched in fascination as the clothes quite literally vanished from the slender honey coloured young looking man standing before him. “How did you…?” he paused uncertainly, wondering if the question was rude. “The clothes are part of our morph.” The honey coloured male called itself Sunkiss and was the ambassador of a pack of shadowshifters (which were apparently different from shapeshifters, but Helios wasn’t quite sure what the difference was aside from they didn’t naturally have genders) which his brother, the newly appointed King Silverfire, had contracted to help get rid of some rather disturbing threats to the kingdom.
Square toes
I was working on 3d-fyn’s feet when 5yo came in and observed what was on my screen. He stared for a little bit, then leaned on my desk so he could pick up and scrutinise his own cute little foot carefully before pointing out that toes weren’t square, but at least I got one right. I told him that my base model was very square and I was fixing it up as I made my characters, and that’s what I was doing right now.
With bells on!
“Speed” paint (wasn’t exactly speedy but was pretty quick by my standards :P) inspired by a conversation with quadrapop and Chappie wherein I eventually commented: “i should see if i can acquisition a small rainbow or just a strip of cloth even, put a large bell on it and wear it as a necklace then i can sit there and flaunt my dubious sexuality as well as being somewhere with bells on”
Blender Adventures Part 2
I finally got basic modelling in Blender. All I needed was to find where the subdivision tool was hidden. Early days Blender and Lightwave comparison: Layout I prefer having a menu on my right as I use a Cintiq and find it quicker to access stuff I don’t know keyboard shortcuts for (or that don’t have keyboard shortcuts) if the menu is over to the right. I can move it in preferences in Lightwave.