I had Quadrapop over earlier today and she was looking over my shoulder and critting the work I'd done on Red's hands so far.  I am aware the hand is the wrong shape and was planning on fixing that in Lightwave where I have poly modelling tools but after receiving the second degree I got motivated enough to attempt it in Sculptris (after firing up Lightwave and fixing the hands on the base models and putting the legs in Da Vinci pose while I was about it).

Quadrapop had in the meantime headed home so I dropped the following image into a group chat blaming her for the kick up the arse:

My head.  It's so full of stuff that I have a very mild persistant headache.  The cold isn't helping either, it makes my shoulder hurt.  I'm glad I don't live somewhere that's actually cold.

Following is a thought dump so I can work out what I'm doing and so anyone that cares can now know why techno was gone for the last month and why I've been in such a ridiculous distracted foul mood.

I'm not convinced my colour map is working.  Will have to see when I do other random renders while fixing up the weight maps and seeing if I can work out cloth dynamics on the clothes.  And I think I need to darken my hair a little bit.  After that all I really need to do is see if I can work out how to get my freckle constellation on my face and I'm calling me done.

Did I mention I bit it and froze the model? Vastly better control on the shape and textures and things but gods working directly with the mesh is a pain in the system.

Animation coming eventually.  I really shouldn't keep going with the "rig test" but I really want to :S

3d-bek wonders what in the hell is going on and what we're getting ourselves into :)

I'm quite pleased with how my rig is turning out.  Little niggly fine tuning things on the arms, but I (finally, because I iz slow) worked out that I should turn off the heading and pitch channels on the shoulder and use the collarbone to control those, and point the elbow with the shoulder's bank channel.

Sasquatch is awesome.  The hand is angled a bit strangley but the hair is automagically avoiding the fingers :D

Low level antialiasing, no cloth dynamics yet, still working on textures and hair.

This time for the arm rigs.

The "blue" arm is using IK boost.  The "red" arm is in default T pose still but is using the original rig which was modified from the leg rig (which works really well so far).  The elbow directional on the arm just wasn't working.  I have ikstop on the collarbone and handles on the elbow and hand to make them that bit easier to see and grab.  Need to remove the elbowD bone from the right hand rig (it's the red bone pointing downward), reorganise the bone hierarchy and apply ikboost to that.  Then have to associate all the sliders with the hand bones seeing as I won't be needing the IK goal nulls anymore.

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.

There are also two  points on the torso along the obliques and on the top part of the shoulder blade that need looking at on the Flier models, I fixed them at some point on Base.

After moving the corners of the mouth inward, the insides of the mouth will also have to be readjusted so they're not poking through.

Rapture and armageddon and all that are upon us, and as per usual Josh has taken the kids to Tao's Auskick game and I stayed home, trained the dogs (could have gone for another 5mins on top of what I did do but I got defeated by the cold) and ripped through an Anki session with a Lojban gismu deck.  We know we're not going anywhere.

With the few precious moments of time alone, I then plugged into Lightwave for more practise on avatars before tackling AEfter Ragnarok characters.

Self portrait.  Don't be fooled by my expression, I have none (literally, haven't done face morphs yet, I am just in t-pose and the mouth is slightly open because it's easier to model and pick points when they're not just about overlapping as happens with closed mouths).  I also have no hair to speak of, need a bump map on my lips, my earrings, tattoos and minute freckle splash are missing, and I'm not convinced my eyes are that accurate (I was however too lazy to go look in the mirror for that long).  I am wearing my favourite shirt (which has an odd red border around the top which I need to figure out how to get rid of) and my pants of power (which look dodgy, but I kind of figured out how to do camo :).

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.

QAD render to celebrate finishing the bulk of rigging. A couple of tiny little tweaks to make but it's stuff I can do as I go.

Low enhanced antialiasing, radiosity and Skytracer on default settings (added the thing, checked the cloud boxes).

Think I used too much blue. And yes it looks funny as there are no joint or face morphs. I need more RAM and less OpenGL sliders.

The pose is based off a really old pic of my sister's as I realised a bit ago that my base models matched up with her fan characters.