technonaturalist

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3dcoat

June ProgBlog #1

I forgot to mention last update. Ages ago (6 years eep) I mashed a calendar for AER. Years later (because I always seem to notice glaring things years later, this does not bode well for whenever I finally get around to animating x_x) I suddenly realised, all the scientists in the Tranquility Calendar are guys.

They were all great and interesting people but seriously?

I mentioned this to darqx and said I wanted to “even” it out a bit (there’s 13 months so it’s going to be slightly lopsided but near enough is good enough as far as I’m concerned). So being the awesome sibling she is, she helped me find a whole pile of notable female scientists from a variety of fields (and by that I mean she found most of them in the time it took me to find a few because one of us can just do things and the other only just do things when the focus is there, and then I somehow had to choose which was bloody hard work).

May ProgBlog #2

After looking at how erratic my steem and Patreon feeds can be, I guess I really better put in the effort to make these weekly, perhaps showing off the pathetic amount of progress I didn’t make will kick me into working more harder smarter.

So as I said last update I’m going back to what I know (which is keeping the polycount as low as possible) but experimenting in a slightly different direction (I have a probably unhealthy obsession with needing all the quads to be as square as possible so I tend to end up with slightly dense meshes).

AER ProgBlog: retopo and storyboarding

Haven’t really had a chance to work much on this lately, always other things demanding attention (and apparently I’m not supposed to take time out of sleep to make up for it but that’s pretty much all I got left).

Tail retopo is driving me up the wall a little bit, I had quite a few goes before I got a mesh I’m vaguely happy with. What I wanted was to just draw the mesh and smoothe it later but apparently my lines were so terribly wonkered that I need to fix everything before I can proceed.

Very late Thursday streaming!

This one is from last Thursday! A lot of stuff happened that prevented solid work on it so it ended up getting dragged out for the entire week! And then I didn’t stream this Thursday because other stuff had to happen. But we got there eventually! In this one I finish off High and continue working on Red. Digits are my nemesis (yes I have several of them).

Track list

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This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

Thursday streaming

Who would have thought that editing a 6 hour video would take longer than a 3 hour one? Additionally I had some fun and drama with KDEnlive, apparently its annoying settings are per project; I had to specifically tell it to use most of my cores for rendering as it kept trying to use one and overheating my computer which caused it to hang and made me mad. And even after telling it to use 7 threads (so I could have one to do stuff with) as it turned out I had to just sit and let it do its thing all by itself as if I attempted to use my computer while it was rendering something would violently overheat and then the computer would hang.

Thursday streaming - now with a process video

This one’s especially for @jedau on Steemit hive who has made numerous requests for a process video. So here’s me retopologising Za’haran/Red like I know what I’m doing, 3hrs timelapsed into ~8.5mins (bonus: learned KDEnlive). I apologise if the flinging around in and outside the head I was doing gives anyone motion sickness. And who knew trying to credit everything I was listening to would take all day, might never do that one again XD

Forgot I was supposed to be streaming update

My headache has finally cleared but my shoulder is still hurting like hell so I managed to completely forget about streaming this weekend, not that I would have been able to stream for more than an hour anyway at the rate I was going, had to take very frequent breaks!

Retopo is another thing that really isn’t my friend so even if I did know a way to reuse retopo models I would likely just keep doing retopo per character just for practice.

Thursday streaming

Yep I’m trying to stream again. I’m currently looking at Thursdays again (because that’s when the inlaws come down to hang with the grandkids and then somehow my house gets cleaned in the meantime, yes I have awesome relatives), Tuesday nights and one of the two weekend days (which one will depend on what is going on at the time), won’t be announcing them til I can make sure the schedule works reliably though. If you’re keen as mustard you can still drop in if you like though.

Realistic vaporeon works in progress

I wanted the texture to be like the viewport render, but it ended up being one glossy vaporeon. He’ll do. Working full time on this now to get it done by the deadline. I was doing really well til I got sick, stupid sickness XD

On the bright side, I learned a fair bit about 3d Coat and going back and forth between it and Blender.

Realistic vaporeon sitting
Aggressive realistic vaporeon
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This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

3D Coat/Blender notes: Getting ptex textures from 3d Coat to Blender

tl;dr: bake the damn things.

After painting, from the paint room go to Textures > Texture Baking Tool

3d Coat Texture Baking Tool menu item

Fill in the stuff on the dialogue box as appropriate (I have no idea how correct my settings are, I tend to take a best guess with anything I don’t know :P)

3d coat texture baking dialogue

Export the model as a .dae, import into Blender. It seems to import as many Ptex materials as layers you used in the 3d Coat’s paint room. I used two layers for the vaporeon model (one for colour, one for displacement). Set the materials up to use nodes and add their files (which will be named to go with each layer, e.g. anything with PtexPlane0 in the name in my case corresponds to PtexMtl0 in the material list).