August ProgBlog #4: Rollin rollin rollin

I needed a break from technical stuff, so I started sculpting Zara. I don’t know why I always start with eyebrows, I just do, so I did the eyebrows, but then deviated from my usual of going down the nose and doing the face and bounced over to doing the ears. Probably because hers are a bit pointy.

The point is tricky as the Avians have an obvious point but their ears aren’t nearly as big as the Dragonkin ears. She doesn’t look like anyone yet but we’ll get there, hopefully in less time than it took to do Red as she’s got the standard amount of limbs and I don’t completely suck at retopo and uv unwrapping anymore (even though I still don’t like either of them XD).

August ProgBlog #3: Weakling!

Today was the last day of regionals at our gym, there were three rounds of level 3s, then 11yo and I stayed to help reset the gym back to normal for training for states in ~4 weeks.

I’m feeling kind of pathetic as after guarding doors for two weekends and helping move heavy equipment everything from the back down are pretty sore (okay in hindsight it was probably stupid to lift the big p-bars by myself but I have good stances, maybe not as good as Zip’s but all I had to do was lift each end in turn so the floor protectors could be put under the feet) and…apparently while I can still use my hands for typing and poking at touch screens, I can’t draw. Well I can but working on @f3nix’s piece is taking way more concentration than it should.

August ProgBlog #2: One step forward

And hopefully I’m not going to have any more backwards steps as I’m thoroughly over them!

Our club is hosting regionals so weekend just gone has been extremely busy (hence why progblog is late) and there is another one is coming up next weekend which will hopefully be not quite as busy. With luck I’ll have this week’s progblog done on time, but it depends on whether we need to help set up on Friday night (as I tend to make progblogs on Friday nights, I do try to post them then as well but it can end up being sometime on the weekend if I don’t finish on time.

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).

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).

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.

Run XD

Base dragging Avi off on another epic adventure (or just to go find the missing-because-not-yet-made D).

Doing the turnaround directly before that with two characters was entertaining.

This work by bek (ryivhnn) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Avi showing off its feathers

Avi showing off its feathers to an admiring Base. Turned off the covert layers so the viewport animation would play in real time (going to have to just toggle visibility when there’s lots of characters) and left them off so it would render a bit quicker. Going to do a couple of refinement passes and decide whether I’m going to interact with them this time round or just have them fly off.

I have wiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiings!

And this time they’re not broken XD

Feather rigging took forever. I probably still haven’t done it right and I cannot for the life of me figure out how to make controllers for them (good thing I’m not aspiring to be a rigger!) but it will do for now.

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