technonaturalist

image link to hive image link to ko-fi

sculpting

May ProgBlog #4: sculpting and scripting

I have no real excuse for the late progblog this time. I just forgot it was Friday yesterday and was merrily sculpting away til late. Fixing sculpts isn’t quite as fun as just making them but I definitely find it more fun than trying to work out retopo or rigging or cloth sim shenanigans.

Blender 2.8 reworking a 3d-Coat sculpt mesh

On the hand the denser bits are the bits I haven’t touched yet, though on the thumb there are just denser bits as I moved in closer (I have both dynatopo and remesh on, controlled by brush detail which seems to be based off however big the brush is). I’m fixing up a lot of shapes (the fingers of both Red and Zara are really spindly) and I’m not looking forward to fixing up Red’s tail (at least I can move it down relatively easily in Blender though it will probably chug). I can get the mesh a lot smoother than I could in 3d-Coat (it’s still unknown why the mesh was persistently lumpy in 3dC, with or without dynatopo/liveclay, and apparently nobody else knows either) which is the main critically important thing for me at the moment as I’m using the sculpt for normal maps as well as shape and I only want some textures appearing in the normal maps, such as scars and the horn patterning. Skin textures are getting done with materials,

To some value of working

Please excuse the slight headache that is the abrupt camera movement towards the end (and maybe don’t watch it if you get motion sick easily ^_^;), I only half-arsed fixed a lot of things after changing the framerate from 24 to 60. There are so many things I need to fix. Including I forgot to turn the arm socks collection back on (I could have sworn I had) but I’m not rerendering this just for that, so you can instead see why she usually wears arm socks. And just not bothering with the hair collisions after a while because this was supposed to be a thing to work out clothes rigging. If this was an actual thing I would have obsessed over it a lot longer.

February ProgBlog #4: making a thing

The sculpt repairs are coming along slowly and painfully but otherwise looking all right.

red sculpt mesh wireframe

The areas I’ve cleaned up have got bigger triangles/more grey area, black bits are super dense mesh. I did actually do part of the face but from quite close, it was a lot darker than that before. The blotchy spots are the bits that were giving me grief in 3d Coat. Sometimes if I go over them enough times with the clean clay brush (doesn’t seem to matter what the setting is) they sometimes will eventually separate from the main mesh which will then let me objectify them and delete them when they go to their own layers. Most of the time all that happens is that holes form in the mesh and I can’t always close them and everything gets violently pulled out of shape and then the other side is destroyed. This is what I get for not working with virtual mirrors (because I keep switching sides because sometimes some things are more comfortable on one side than the other).

FFebruary ProgBlog #3: rinse repeat ad nauseum

I’ve spent an accumulation of 2-5 years redoing various swathes of work (mostly in the 3d department, but there was nearly a year worth of solid script fixing as well) for this project so to say that I am well and truly over it and desperately want a massive chunk of progress is an understatement of truly epic proportions.

But guess what I’m doing again because this

red-holey-mess

happened in 3d Coat and after failing to sort it out (there were some holes that 3d Coat would fill and otherwise it simply did not know what to do with) I sent the model to Blender to patch the holes.

February ProgBlog #2: look at this beautiful thing!

LOOK AT IT.

rainbow keyboard

THE RAINBOW MOVES. I LOVE IT.

The default setting where it’s just gently scrolling left to right is my favourite though it can also spiral and “rain” (where keys randomly light up in a rain hitting the ground kind of pattern). My old keyboard had a few issues but otherwise still worked perfectly fine (the biggest issues I had were it was a lot harder than I like so my typing speed was greatly reduced as I had to pound the keys, I like just touching them and getting a response, and the right side of the spacebar had popped off so I had to switch to using my left thumb which is the off side for space) but J somehow got the idea that it was well on the way out and bought me that as a wide margin birthday present (no I’m not telling you when that is but it’s definitely not yet XP).

February ProgBlog #1: pingpong

On Tuesday I posted this screenie of Zara in showoff pose on ko-fi

kofi-zara-test-anim

and that’s where I’m still currently stuck while the next few moves work themselves out in my head.

It was a good excuse to jump back to Red and redo the retopo. My edge loops are probably not the best right now but they were a lot worse on my original retopo, no wonder I was having so much trouble with deformations. Not to mention it was probably a lot heavier than it should have been. Having said that it was kind of an experiment in seeing if I could get high poly to work and I’m not smart enough so I’ll stick with mid poly and subdivision surfaces. And fix all the edge loops while I’m about it because there was no coming back from that one.

September ProgBlog #1

Small victory for having made all the progblogs last month!

We’ve had awesome fun times with everyone in the house except me (so far touch wood aargh) succumbing to this rather awful gastro over the course of the week, so in fairness not quite as much done as I would have liked to do (even though I whined about my glacial speed at the time), but slow progress is better than no progress!

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.

Screenshot 20180824 220542

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).

Very late Thursday streaming!

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

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Thursday streaming

Yep I’m trying to stream again. I’m currently looking at Thursdays again (because that’s when the inlaws come down to hang with the grandkids and then somehow my house gets cleaned in the meantime, yes I have awesome relatives), Tuesday nights and one of the two weekend days (which one will depend on what is going on at the time), won’t be announcing them til I can make sure the schedule works reliably though. If you’re keen as mustard you can still drop in if you like though.