character development
It's all about the camera angle
The poses are exactly the same, just the camera angles are different, and it changes the entire feel of the piece.
I couldn’t decide between the screencaps initially so I polled it. Quadrapop, Chappie and 8yo voted for the first one, Sprat voted the second one and did a massive artistic crit in capital letters when she found out she’d been outvoted. I then lined the second one (I don’t call it inking unless the lines will actually stay on the piece), and because I draw pretty quick when I’m drawing over something I then drew over the second one for the hell of it. Gives me a bit more to think about when choosing camera angles anyway.
Sculpty goodness and pipeline change
While sculpting horns I was quite sure I was going to use Blender for all the sculpty goodness seeing as it had actually imported the mesh to begin with. I think I’m going to have to accept the fact that my brain is never going to play nicely with Blender because even though I have been doing so much better than I ever have, I still don’t understand it.
Very roughly positioned front, side and three-quarter view of the character in a window on the 21in monitor. The actual work was being done on the Cintiq at close range. The multiscreening is one seriously cool thing about Blender and I do miss it a little bit in Sculptris
Quickie insight into bek's thought process, or one reason why AR is taking an inordinate amount of time to get anywhere
I have a “family tree” in MacFamilyTree which contains a lot of family saplings as it contains every named major and minor character and several unnamed but otherwise important ones (such as parents of siblings, as you need to list parents to be able to link people up as siblings). The main part of the family tree seems to be tracing The Art from Taha’ne through Ter’wyn down to My’rai (currently the last descendant on the list, the character is about 8-10 in my head in his current state and I also have an idea of him as a teenager but only have snippets of story for him) which is rather entertaining as there is 1723 years between them. That’s a lot of characters even given that the Dragonkin live an average of 120 years.
New age, new year, not new resolutions, and photos
Happy new year everyone! gleki ninyna’anunsla if you speak lojban :)
Somehow, from somewhere, I have this 7 year old.
The Little Big Boy turned 7. He requested and got a chocolate cake which my mum made. It was very tasty. The “oldies” were commenting on how fast he turned 7. I’m trying to work out how he survived that long ;)
Lightwave3D notes: fixes for base characters + clothes notes
Many face tweaks.
The “entire area” vertex may pinch the mesh strangely with that many patches using it as a corner, but will have to see how I go with the face morphs. Also I’m stupid and the “moved outward” applies to the vertex above the one highlighted, I am too lazy to change the diagram.
Starzone/Zara
Starzone is the mouse. Zara is the human. Zara uses “Starzone” as a callsign.
The original Starzone was a Biker Mice from Mars fan character done in the usual style of fan characters, she was way overpowered and Mary Sue and may have had stupid random flaws attached to not make her seem as overpowered and Mary Sue as she was. I redeveloped her a bit later and she turned out all right, though I never got around to publishing the fanfic with her and her coterie. I only roleplay her these days.
Avatar blue
QaD render of Za’haran’s face to see how the eyes and lip textures turned out. They’re not terrible, though I think I want to do more with his eyes. Using the Fast Skin shader that ships with Lightwave, which does a pretty good job of making skin look more skin-like than I know how to get it. I added a procedural to break it up as it was entirely too smooth and perfect.
Buy me a drink first
Zul’jinn jolted internally as Megan seemed to materialise out of the crowd beside them, catching hold of Zara and pulling her close with a playful growl as she attempted to nip the smaller girl’s shoulder. Zara for her part looked completely unsurprised, casually fending off the double grope by catching Megan’s wrists, leaning back against the heart stoppingly beautiful blonde.
“Hey Megs,” she said, her voice coloured with amusement, before spinning out of Megan’s arms and turning to face her. Megan followed up, grabbing Zara’s hips and pulling her close again, this time planting a kiss on the lips.