January ProgBlog #3: dark alleyways

Last night was an exercise in frustration. There was a bunch of chores to finish up, and then all I wanted to do was some art and to hopefully get the progblog knocked out before it got too late.

Instead of spending a couple of hours being able to work solidly after putting youngest to bed (the two bigs had gone off on yet another sleepover), I ended up fiddling around with the material for Zara’s eyes in an attempt to make them reflective for maybe half an hour to an hour, and then the rest of the time trying to recover/work with one crash that happened during a test render (which is extremely inconvenient given this is what I got the rig for but sadly not that unusual) and a weird drama where the keyboard and mouse stopped being useful (both mouse and stylus would move the cursor but clicks were ignored, and all input keyboard was ignored except for switching terminals, and then it would work perfectly fine in another terminal) that resulted in me downing tools for the night (angrily hard shutting down the rig and leaving it off overnight which I don’t recall ever doing before).

December ProgBlog #1: kerbstomped by silly season

I shall do my utmost to keep up but this year silly season is seriously kerbstomping me x_x

And I don’t think staying up late is helping that much but it feels like it is.

We seem to be rigging all right, I did some big motions with limbs and turned her into a pretzel and here I was playing around with small expressions.

Split the panels just so I could show the non-animators among us the puppet controls and the result.

November ProgBlog #5: and we're back

What is this 5 weeks shenanigans.

So pretty much trying to pick up where I was before I jumped back to do more retopo. That texture baking tool in 3dC is a lifesaver when you’re inept like me x_x The skin texture is now reasonable enough for in your face shots:

And an in your face Eevee render as close as the clipping distance would let me get (I’m not even sure I have many if any extreme closeups like this):

November ProgBlog #4: bugger that density

After getting increasingly annoyed about how dense the mesh was becoming as well as general annoyance about having to do yet more rework and the fact that some things simply didn’t want to stay square, I threw that idea through a brick wall and decided to just extrude the nails like I was originally planning and hope it wouldn’t make a mess.

Which meant first trying to get used to the extrude tool (press enter first, then move it, then switch tools because pressing enter again doesn’t drop it, I don’t even remember which program that habit came from).

November ProgBlog #2: little touchups

Did I mention there was a lot of transitioning going on?

12yo is back homeschooling (kind of forced the issue and pulled her out as while she kept insisting til she was blue in the face that she adored school and absolutely under no circumstances wanted to quit, she refused to go due to being constantly “sick”) so I’ve readjusted all my schedules again, and because I keep staying up late (I just work better at night!) I’ve stuffed up a lot of my own timing.

November ProgBlog #1: Unstuck and into Blender

Alternate title: PROGRESS. I AM MAKING IT.

I still have no idea what the original problem was, but I did manage to work around.

And I managed to work around because painting the normal map in the paint room was hell and I also really, really wanted to solve the other problem.

Because I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, even though I realised the 3d Coat menus were contextual, I didn’t really realise they were contextual. So for a long time it didn’t occur to me that I could export the sculpt mesh. I got there eventually though, and sent it over to Blender to see if I could figure out what was wrong with it.

October ProgBlog #4: stuck (and a minor temper tantrum)

I have made zero progress this week, as the entire thing was spent failing to figure out this problem never mind resolve it.

Basically what’s happened is that every time I go to bake (and it doesn’t seem to matter what baking option I choose, there seems to be a few), the sculpt mesh decides to do this at some point either just before the bake starts or right at the beginning somewhere:

October ProgBlog #3: borked (and partly noteorial)

I couldn’t just fix the polyflow around the shoulders like I was intending. I ended up redoing the entire torso and the hips, butt and connecting part of the thighs.

I don’t know how well it will animate in general but it will be a lot better than how it was. This meant the uv maps had to get redone as well. Then I spent two days trying to figure out how to fix the mess before remembering that 3dC is supposed to be able to deal with stuff like this and looking up how to do that instead.

October ProgBlog #2: steem is also a timesink :S

If it’s not PvZ I’ve been distracted by steem, oops :S And I haven’t even been wandering off my not-that-busy feed, I just have this bad habit of commenting on most of the things I upvote ^_^;

Finally finished the phoenix tattoo! Well I’m pretty sure it’s finished anyway, I’ve dropped shadow layers on the body and the froof and after some playing around decided the wings and tail feathers don’t need shadowing.

October ProgBlog #1: games are timesinks

So there I was, making some excellent headway on the wings, when I broke my photo library. Actually I’m not sure what I did to it, I have to write August homeschool miscellany (which I will probably combine with September homeschool miscellany depending on how many photos I end up pulling out of September) and Digikam was giving me grief so I decided to import the photos with Shotwell.

That went fine til I noticed it was pulling in photos from the beginning of the year as “new” and seemed to be giving them the wrong creation dates, so I stopped that one quickly and went to finish the import with Digikam.