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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).
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).
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Blender’s viewport is massively outdated and exceedingly laggy.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.
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). Also don’t know when this thing came in
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.
March ProgBlog #3
Last week was working on pants and boots (and getting to use some fabric normals and a leather material some kind souls made available on Blendswap): trying to wrangle the hair into several hair ties (it was supposed to be tied with a cord but I finally got it through my thick skull that it wouldn’t stay, even when I did have long hair I didn’t do anything interesting with it, so I’m going to claim total stupidity ignorance and too much anime on my part there!
AER March ProgBlog #2
Currently all about hair and pants. I did the pants first to procrastinate the hair. They do actually have a pattern but I turned down the lights so the skin wouldn’t be so overblown, so it’s something that will be noticed in bright light. Otherwise they look like…black pants. I was thinking of using velcro for the trail strap but may end up just making it an elastic loop as maybe in the future there will be little nano thingies in the clothes that automatically repair fraying clothing so the elastic doesn’t give out.
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).
Happy New Year!
Farewell 2017, happy 2018! I did my usual and had a drink while 3d-ing. I probably should have taken a photo of the drink for the benefit of the steem crowd but didn’t. JJ piked out but the kids stayed up with me (probably for the novelty of staying up til midnight as 8yo’s bedtime is 8, and the big two at 9:30). Despite procrastinating for pretty much the entire day I managed to finally close the retopo and have started painting.