I was actually intending to do this on Friday, but I was also setting up some new backup drives (my original drive was appropriated) and needed to copy the old backup from my computer (where it's currently taking up a HELL of a lot of space!) and I found out the hard way that I can't use 3d Coat and have big copy operations going at the same time because it makes my computer run out of memory.

Above is ram and swap usage with 3dC open.  Think it might have something to do with the 16k uv map I'm using.  I have 32Gb of ram.  I should probably get more.

Blender's viewport is massively outdated and exceedingly laggy.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.

Haven't really had a chance to work much on this lately, always other things demanding attention (and apparently I'm not supposed to take time out of sleep to make up for it but that's pretty much all I got left).

Tail retopo is driving me up the wall a little bit, I had quite a few goes before I got a mesh I'm vaguely happy with.  What I wanted was to just draw the mesh and smoothe it later but apparently my lines were so terribly wonkered that I need to fix everything before I can proceed.

This one is from last Thursday! A lot of stuff happened that prevented solid work on it so it ended up getting dragged out for the entire week! And then I didn't stream this Thursday because other stuff had to happen.  But we got there eventually! In this one I finish off High and continue working on Red.  Digits are my nemesis (yes I have several of them).

Track list

Who would have thought that editing a 6 hour video would take longer than a 3 hour one? Additionally I had some fun and drama with KDEnlive, apparently its annoying settings are per project; I had to specifically tell it to use most of my cores for rendering as it kept trying to use one and overheating my computer which caused it to hang and made me mad.  And even after telling it to use 7 threads (so I could have one to do stuff with) as it turned out I had to just sit and let it do its thing all by itself as if I attempted to use my computer while it was rendering something would violently overheat and then the computer would hang.

If it keeps that up I'm not sure how I'm ever going to render out episodes.  Good thing I'm not planning any feature films!

This one's especially for @jedau on Steemit who has made numerous requests for a process video.  So here's me retopologising Za'haran/Red like I know what I'm doing, 3hrs timelapsed into ~8.5mins (bonus: learned KDEnlive).  I apologise if the flinging around in and outside the head I was doing gives anyone motion sickness.  And who knew trying to credit everything I was listening to would take all day, might never do that one again XD

My headache has finally cleared but my shoulder is still hurting like hell so I managed to completely forget about streaming this weekend, not that I would have been able to stream for more than an hour anyway at the rate I was going, had to take very frequent breaks!

Retopo is another thing that really isn't my friend so even if I did know a way to reuse retopo models I would likely just keep doing retopo per character just for practice.

I usually start with eyes and go out from there but this time I started on the nose because there's a million loops in the nose (okay three).  Then laughed when I started the eye loops (the ones in the pic didn't stay as I ended up doing them differently) as I thought it looked like one of those comical scenes where the character is doing those facial things involving green stuff on the face and cucumbers or some other fruit on the eyes and have to come rushing out for whatever reason.

Head and torso retopologising in Blender 2.71

Alternate title: my Blender muscles are atrophying -_-

I had a lot of work on the last three weeks and have now slowed down as I put out a call for help a couple of days ago and now waiting on a response.  In the meantime I'm slowing down back to normal and getting back into the 3d (no 3d for three weeks make bek something something).  So three weeks ago after stuffing around with the rig I eventually came to the conclusion that the topology around the hips was wrong.  After trying and failing to fix it by spinning edges, I decided to just retopo the whole thing because I wasn't sure about the loops around the face either.

It's moving at a frightening pace for me as I'm used to doing everything with excruciating slowness.  I love bsurfaces.  It is quite literally the thing that had me giving Blender a go again at that point (previously my Blender attempts were for a couple of weeks once or twice a year, end of last year was a last ditch "this thing is cool so why not let's try it again" and that's when I got it).

Cross-hatching mesh onto the face which I don't do anymore as I eventually found it quicker to just highlight edges and keep extending it rather than constantly merging points (mainly as I don't know how to merge a strip of points)