November ProgBlog #3: dense

That's what the head is at the moment and I'm not even done.

Wait what haven't I done this already? Well yes I had, but while I was working on the skin shader and trying to work out if you can keyframe changes in nodes (which I'll need for the procedural eye texture, and apparently yes you can though I will have to figure out how) I realised I should probably do fingernail and claw procedurals as well so I don't have to keep repainting them each character, so I jumped back into 3dC to add actual geometry for the finger and toe nails, as previously they were being done entirely with normal mapping.

I realised I was going to make more of a mess out of the mesh than I already had with the rearranging of the shoulder polyflow, breasts and hip/thigh polyflow, had another mini-meltdown and decided to try again with a higher poly mesh.

I have to keep telling myself I am deliberately doing a higher poly mesh as the density so far is making me a bit unhappy.  I usually retopo the way I used to edge model (from the head down) but this time I tried a new-to-me madness method and jumped around between places planning out specific densities and polyflows and trying to connect them all together.  I am worried that I may have overdone the density around the face as while I am trying to use as little as possible I am also trying to keep everything as square as possible this time (last mesh had a lot of rectangles which I was trying to ignore but they would have probably come back and bitten me or at least sliced me repeatedly when animating).

Next two weekends are going to be really busy again and I have no idea what the weeks are going to be like as we're trying out another homeschool group once they're back from break and we're trying to add weekly swimming in while the swimming weather is good as well as some other excursiony type stuff and somewhere along the lines I'm going to have to try to kick the boys into doing things everyone hates because proof of work is my eternal nemesis.

I like to dream that one day I'll be able to earn enough crypto and ko-fi to work on this thing full time and be able to actually get things done in something resembling a timely manner (or as timely as my ocd perfectionism will allow), but for now I'm stuck in my catch-22 hell and will keep doing what I can when I can XD