February ProgBlog #2: circliar

The title is a cute mispronunciation youngest used to say for that word group when he was a toddler (circliar, triangliar, particliar…).

Circular is closer to where I’m getting.

I’m really glad about this as for a moment I thought that I wasn’t going to be able to fit everything into a circle.

Even if the middle bit (the rectangle where the crosshair looking 3d cursor is) is 40min long x_x

February ProgBlog #1: moving at glacial speed

I managed to draw up a rough schedule to try and fit everything in, and am fully prepared to shuffle stuff around. At the moment hive and Duolingo are my biggest time sinks, going well over the hour each I’ve allotted them; hive because it’s hive and there’s a bit going on plus I’m supposed to be moderating a couple of communities and I’m doing a terrible job even looking at them never mind anything else, Duolingo because I was finding it easy so I gave myself a challenge of getting to the next level each time instead of just doing one stack, and then got a thing where it wanted me to use the keyboard instead of the word bank, and I found out the hard way that I’ve been sight reading Chinese and Japanese and haven’t actually associated many sounds with characters.

January ProgBlog #3: glassy

The plane managed to land (rather heavily by the sound of things) despite the dubious weather on Christmas Island, and we made it back in the appropriate number of pieces just in time for what sounds like a proper lockdown, it seems.

Seriously though why do people insist on hoarding toilet paper.

Well, one week extra planning I guess, and I have to reschedule two appointments. The extra planning time will be helpful as I will probably need to actually have a work schedule again so I can learn the nonsense I need to figure out this hive front end silliness.

July ProgBlog #1: guess who's stuck, stuck again

If you are new to 3d, getting stuck and having to rework things using better techniques that you figure out later is perfectly normal (unless you’re a prodigy).

And if you went to some fancy school to learn stuff, experiment anyway because the stuff taught in schools is one way to do things, not the only or necessarily best way to do things.

I originally held off progblog on Friday because I got cool things from @bearone which I wanted to write about instead, but my computer and phone don’t want to interact properly (I can plug the phone in, tell it to trust the computer, the computer can see the phone and see all the photos and videos on the phone, but importing is flakey. Sometimes stuff will go in (including old stuff which it can’t seem to work out is old stuff which then ends up in completely the wrong date folder even though it’s supposed to be sorted by exif date which is shown correctly, at this stage I don’t even know how it’s sorting things but it’s absolutely not doing what it’s supposed to be doing).

June ProgBlog #1: textual feeling

What do you mean that’s reminding you of a song? XD

I’ve been bouncing between working on the sculpt to try to have something interesting and visual for the progblog because people in general seem to prefer pretty pictures (guess it’s much easier to glance, upvote and keep scrolling than actually have to read? XD), but sadly there is still a metric boatload of work nobody is ever going to see or even realise exists to get done as well.

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.

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,

January ProgBlog #2: shenanigans, shenanigans!

Or: why fyn has a ridiculously comprehensive and detailed head universe.

Like all good stories, it started off innocently enough. I finished eyebrows and eyelashes and did some super quickie expression tests:

My lights are really close and pretty bright hence the intense reflection, if they’re still too reflective under normal lighting conditions I’ll have to fiddle with the node a bit more.

April ProgBlog #1: deja vu

Almost fell into old habits of not posting because I’m currently stuck in November as far as progress on stuff I was supposed to be working on (before getting massively sidetracked by the Rewrite the Stars songpic).

Now I had actually gotten a fair way further than this and was doing pretty all right when I realised two things.

March ProgBlog #2: was this where the rail was?

I fell so far off the track I’m not sure I’ll be able to find it again, maybe it was a cliff I plummeted off? Who thought building a railroad through this kind of territory was a good idea?

Guess I’ll just have to make yet another one. Again. There’s probably a perfectly good plain not far away that would have made for a much easier journey too.

In tonight’s work in progress shot I’m working on shadow 3 of frame 4, featuring my scribbly placeholder writing which was laid out before I knew that I was going to do this twisty perspective run on nightmarish thing with the buildings. The first two frames/sections went more or less according to plan and then after the third frame I’ve been changing text placement on the fly. It’s been working out so far.

November ProgBlog #1

I missed two aaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Anyway. I’m currently stuck with the dance animation because the characters didn’t end up where I wanted them to be due to a severely truncated tumble run.

I originally planned for Zara to do a proper diagonal with at least a slight run-up and 4-5 tricks. Then I had a problem of Rei’s tumble run being not nearly as long because she’s just learning and doesn’t know nearly as many tricks as Zara, plus she does a slower and more graceful one that doesn’t utilise a run up.