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Sep
16
2018

September ProgBlog #3: bouncing everywhere

I'm still editing week before's Wednesday streaming and have to start on last week's, ideally before I do this week's but cutting music is hard.

Screenshot 20180916 130812

Aug
30
2018

Avatar for f3nix

avatar

Finally finished f3nix's avatar! Not sure if this is steampunky enough but I am the type that would likely go a bit overboard with gears and stuff (drawing gears is somewhat cool and mostly terrifying even with a base) which is impractical in this scenario, would have had to do a showy portrait shot for that to work.  I can still do that if preferred, it will just take a while again :S

I had a sketchy already, I just modified the base to add some gears, a random little battery type thing and a box of screwdrivers in the corner which kind of ended up getting mostly cut out anyway, and also changed the goggles so the eyes were visible (and also because the telescopic goggles looked slightly ridiculous).  Then went over slowly and obsessively with the fineliner pen brush.

Aug
24
2018

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

Jul
22
2018

Mohawk party

Boomy and Kubby

You only need one other person for a party right? XD

I'd settled down to work on poor f3nix's avatar (poor because they've been waiting ages for it! I'm so sorry!) but there was something wrong with my hand.  Lineart was excessively slow and shaky, I kept having to redo lines constantly and despite drawing over both a sketch and having the base available (though it was broken as I had a set of bases that just wouldn't render correctly for some reason) I could not for the life of me get my hand to cooperate or certain bits to look right.

May
25
2018

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). 

Retopo continues at glacial speed.  We're currently at 24 438 faces, should still (hopefully) be under 100k by the time I'm done with the rest of the fingers and the wings, and Blender should be able to cope with that.  With luck I won't have to make it 100m tall for auto weight mapping to work.

May
11
2018

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.  I'm not waiting around for it, I'll just let it catch up to me which is highly likely.

Apr
24
2018

Tubcat

tubcat

TubCat goes around giving unwashed humans a hard time for being not as intelligent as a tubcat, as far as I can tell.  It's generally amusing.

What was less amusing was finally getting a good result on a jpb export (had to fiddle with Krita settings again) only for my blog to do something weird with it on upload, making the colours darker.  Seeing as this was

I went with the png which worked out much better at the cost of being four times bigger.  Sigh.

Apr
20
2018

Upbokki

1

BMJ requested a springbok holding a shot glass and a rugby ball for a mascot for one of the communities he's in.  He got a bonus two because I had some fun ideas.  I wasn't going to do any shading but felt that they needed that something extra.  Haven't done cel shading for a while but it worked out better than expected, partially helped by learning how to handle the new Krita brushes.

Apr
07
2018

AER crowd character: LordHyena

LordNigel the Hyena Evolved

Hyenas tend to be punks or warriors or punk warriors and I was pretty tempted but nope because it's LORD Nigel, that called for a civil, classy hyena.

He may end up with ear piercings down the line.

Mar
24
2018

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):

Screenshot 20180324 134447

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!):