June ProgBlog #2: buttery

That’s what Blender sculpt mode feels like at the moment.

I don’t know whether it’s because I found some settings that make me happy or whether I finally got the polycount down to something Blender is happier with (got it down to 3.5M from 3.7M after I decided to reduce the polycount in the wing membranes using super light dabs with the clay brush and it’s been jumping mostly down as I continue reworking things and Blender remeshes everything I touch) or whether something has been going on under the hood as I swear every time Manjaro does a system update there’s a new version of Blender in there somewhere (this may or may not be a slight exaggeration).

June ProgBlog #1: textual feeling

What do you mean that’s reminding you of a song? XD

I’ve been bouncing between working on the sculpt to try to have something interesting and visual for the progblog because people in general seem to prefer pretty pictures (guess it’s much easier to glance, upvote and keep scrolling than actually have to read? XD), but sadly there is still a metric boatload of work nobody is ever going to see or even realise exists to get done as well.

May ProgBlog #4: sculpting and scripting

I have no real excuse for the late progblog this time. I just forgot it was Friday yesterday and was merrily sculpting away til late. Fixing sculpts isn’t quite as fun as just making them but I definitely find it more fun than trying to work out retopo or rigging or cloth sim shenanigans.

On the hand the denser bits are the bits I haven’t touched yet, though on the thumb there are just denser bits as I moved in closer (I have both dynatopo and remesh on, controlled by brush detail which seems to be based off however big the brush is). I’m fixing up a lot of shapes (the fingers of both Red and Zara are really spindly) and I’m not looking forward to fixing up Red’s tail (at least I can move it down relatively easily in Blender though it will probably chug). I can get the mesh a lot smoother than I could in 3d-Coat (it’s still unknown why the mesh was persistently lumpy in 3dC, with or without dynatopo/liveclay, and apparently nobody else knows either) which is the main critically important thing for me at the moment as I’m using the sculpt for normal maps as well as shape and I only want some textures appearing in the normal maps, such as scars and the horn patterning. Skin textures are getting done with materials,

To some value of working

Please excuse the slight headache that is the abrupt camera movement towards the end (and maybe don’t watch it if you get motion sick easily ^_^;), I only half-arsed fixed a lot of things after changing the framerate from 24 to 60. There are so many things I need to fix. Including I forgot to turn the arm socks collection back on (I could have sworn I had) but I’m not rerendering this just for that, so you can instead see why she usually wears arm socks. And just not bothering with the hair collisions after a while because this was supposed to be a thing to work out clothes rigging. If this was an actual thing I would have obsessed over it a lot longer.

May ProgBlog #3: Blender 2.8 notes - cloth sim

Progblog is actually late because I decided to combine it with a Blender notes and it took the better part of forever x_x

Make a collider. Some people do it by decimating a copy of the character. I made one by my old Blender retopo method of edge modelling with mirror and shrinkwrap modifiers (which took way, way, way longer than it should have because I kept stopping, procrastinating and whining all the way through it, much like my children with the much hated bookwork) and remembered why I bought 3d Coat. I did that rather than decimating so the collider would have no facial features aside from hints of eye sockets and a nose bump, and no digits, so it could be super low poly and the right shape (this one is not really super low as the head and hands are a bit dense).

April ProgBlog #3: the sleeve bone's connected to the...

Actually the clothes bones aren’t connected to anything.

I had one more go with playing with lattices and bonevelopes for the croptop rig, and then went back to the straight bonevelope rig and added a few more bones and made all the bones smaller and with smaller envelopes, as I had a lot more control over the shape and the twists of those annoying little shoulder straps with the bonevelope rig. It’s holding shape a bit better.

January ProgBlog #3: dark alleyways

Last night was an exercise in frustration. There was a bunch of chores to finish up, and then all I wanted to do was some art and to hopefully get the progblog knocked out before it got too late.

Instead of spending a couple of hours being able to work solidly after putting youngest to bed (the two bigs had gone off on yet another sleepover), I ended up fiddling around with the material for Zara’s eyes in an attempt to make them reflective for maybe half an hour to an hour, and then the rest of the time trying to recover/work with one crash that happened during a test render (which is extremely inconvenient given this is what I got the rig for but sadly not that unusual) and a weird drama where the keyboard and mouse stopped being useful (both mouse and stylus would move the cursor but clicks were ignored, and all input keyboard was ignored except for switching terminals, and then it would work perfectly fine in another terminal) that resulted in me downing tools for the night (angrily hard shutting down the rig and leaving it off overnight which I don’t recall ever doing before).