May ProgBlog #1

Blender’s viewport is massively outdated and exceedingly laggy. This has made trying to correct the weights on the ~300k poly model of Red agonisingly painful and take way, way longer than it should be. I still have plans to do a proxy for animating with, but that doesn’t remove the need for the actual model to work. Apparently this will be fixed and updated later this year and from the sounds of the people who are braving it in its current bug-infested state, it will be wonderful. I’m not waiting around for it, I’ll just let it catch up to me which is highly likely.

April ProgBlog #2

Finally got all the stupid hair guides sorted and grouped, time for some expression testing!

Which also gives me a chance to fix weight maps. The auto-weight mapping does a pretty decent job, but it’s not perfect and touchups around the place are usually required (like for some insane reason half the innermost wing membrane was associated with the little finger why).

Blender notes: curve guides for particle hair and bonus hair colour without making separate emitter geometry

Add the hair in the usual fashion.

By default the hair will just sprout wherever. To restrict it to a certain part of the mesh, create a vertex group in vertex paint mode, and then use the group you created as a density map (found at the bottom of the particle panel).

On the SAME LAYER (this is very important, I say because it completely stuffed me for a ridiculously, laughably long time), shift+A and add a curve (I ended up using nurbs as from my extremely quick experimentation it seems to animate the fastest, but any curve will do the job). Adjust the curve to stick one end on the surface of the model, and drag the rest out as long as you need with as many points as you need.

April ProgBlog #1

I still haven’t worked out whether it’s better to keep a regular update even if it’s “I’m an idiot and got stuck again” or just not say anything if I’m that stuck.

So after combing the hair into the right shape, I found out a few things.

• while the collision detection works really nicely in particle edit mode, it completely fails when actual physics is applied, because for whatever reason the emitter collision is completely ignored
• I can’t work out for the life of me how the hell to rig particle hair

I’ve done spline IK for the tail rig so was trying to do something similar with the hair but don’t understand how particle weights work. Wasn’t the biggest leap to find out about curve guides, and then took me the better part of forever to work out that curve guides had to be on the same layer as the particle emitter to work. Once that was sorted out, I then spent way too long playing around with the different curve types to work out which one would be the best for the job. Seems that nurbs animates quickest so that’s what I’m using.

AER March ProgBlog #1

Lame excuse: I haven’t done a progblog forever because I got well and truly stuck redoing the prehensile tail rig, but I think I’ve fixed it now, and made it work (to some value of work) with the pitchipoy rig (the spline and its controllers are actually on their own rig, but the spline controllers are copying the location of some controllers that are on the pitchipoy rig with additional thingies to keep them from moving too far from each other, feels a bit convoluted but it works).

Thursday streaming results

The problem with doing 3d or animation or 3d animation (for me at least) is that the works in progress shots can be exceedingly boring. I spent pretty much the entire streaming day yesterday finishing up the tail end of the rig test anim, and am currently letting it finish up a timing render which didn’t finish overnight because I forgot to turn Avi’s particles off. Oops.

I’m aware the feathers are being awkward, they will get folded down in the detail run (I need to figure out how to do feather controllers, or if there’s just a better way to rig them, they’re doing my head in). These are from the end of the test, where the three of them have a quick conversation while turning away from the camera (because I wanted to end with the My 3 pose) which then pans around to be in front of them (I do also need some panning practice).

Sunday and Monday streaming

I’m usually streaming on Picarto on Sundays after 12 and Thursdays from 9am-3pm AWST, though lion dance season is coming up which may throw the Sunday streaming a bit. I did a random ~4hr stream today as the in-laws have a busy week this week and decided to come today rather than not coming at all because they’re awesome like that, working on an Ingress wallpaper:

Yesterday I switched up between working on the Zul’jinn concept:

New Year WIPs

Stuff I was working on as the year ticked over (because we apparently don’t do parties anymore).

Still working on the rig test animation, just about at the end of the blocking phase and then I go back through with the detail phase (there should only be one but there will probably be 2-3 and me trying and probably failing to stop myself). The unofficial title of the above is “YOU IDIOT”. All will become clear when I get the render out XD D is average Dragonkin height (2m tall) but I think I made Avi and Base a little bit small, should have made them 1.7m instead of 1.6.

Are we getting sick of the greys yet?

The Dragonkin build was relatively easier than the Avian one; the wing fingers were a little bit fiddly but there were only five of them as opposed to a million feathers and all one object as opposed to a million XD

The tail rig was an almighty pain. Firstly, the pitchipoy script couldn’t seem to recognise the bones if I did the tail the easy way (one big bone subdivided down into a million little ones). Or if they were extruded one from another. Long winded duplicate, move along Y a bit and then connect worked (but took ages). Then I tried using bone hooks which I’ve done before but I kept stuffing something or other up and the spline would end up either moving or stretching a long way and I couldn’t seem to find the right combination of settings to make it stop sucking. Then I found this other method that uses bone envelopes which did the job I was trying to do and was a lot easier to set up (one armature modifier vs a million hook modifiers). Except that I’d made the tail too short so I made it longer. Then realised I need the end of the tail to remain stiff as in the time period I’m writing in pretty much all the Dragonkin have weaponised tails (I don’t think they all did in their early generations, but I’ll deal with that if I ever have to make a Dragonkin with a plain tail). Apparently pitchipoy didn’t like me modifying the bone chain so I had to do it again. Ergh.

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.

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