Blender Dysphoria

Hobbyist 3D modeling and animation, mostly in Blender.

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Did a pretty good job hiding the transition between rendered grass and a jpg I got off Flickr, but probably a wee bit extravagant for unfocused background detail.

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Basic test completed. Not great result but better than I expected on first try, and successfully tested out the rig. Love that squash/stretch.

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I might be done the armature rigging. Doing tests to figure out how to lay out the keying sets. This is my attempt at rough blocking. (I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing.)

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and a test of the ‘leaning’ deformation. Takes it a bit extreme but good to have wiggle room.

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Testing to see if the slight floppiness of the rig is present in rendering. Yep. Need to make it less floppy.

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In the home stretch with the rig. Stupid complicated, but after a lot of trial and error (I’m learning Python? okayyyy) does pretty much what I set out to do. Tilts on multiple pivot points automatically, spine/head can lock to tilt or be set independently, bottom can flex or stay flat when tilting. Just added twisting controls to spine. Gotta record video to show it off. Need to add shoulders, debug the feet, revise head control, &c... but really almost done!

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Needs all the tweaking, but finally got the base of the model to “lean”, in all four directions, automatically with the tilt. Using eight “child of” constraints and four “feet” deform bones and a bunch of simple drivers. Which will become more complicated when I give a control to turn this all off, if I want the character to balance on the sharp corner of its base.

They’re also independently keyframable, if I need... toe tapping? (no idea what I’m doing with this, of course.)

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Basically been jumping between shoulders and eyes for weeks and weeks. Tonight finally made pretty good progress on latter. Mostly on the external anatomy, eyelids and such. I actually bought digital calipers so I could measure my own eye and try to get it right. (spoiler: sticking metal calipers near your eye is a bad idea.) But this did help me crack the anatomy. And then I decided to get fancy on the eye itself, with IORs for the cornea and inner structures and shit. WHY.

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Silar needs a nosejob but otherwire....?

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State of the Silar. Deformation tests/mesh cleaning going well, but I think I just ruined the shoulders. Again. LOL

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Completely redid the legs. Haven’t tested them, so will probably redo them again. Also completely redid the mouth. I can promise I’m not going to completely redo the shoulders. Hopefully.

Need to really reduce the detail but at least I seem to be making slow progress, not going in circles.

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Initial deformation tests went super well, so doing a last pass on the sculpt. (Basically I’ve kept the original underlying high-res “maquette” and re-sculpt areas as needed, and then then re-snap the final mesh to conform to the new shape. Also used lattices to make quick larger deformations to both the maquette and the final.)

Kinda messed up the neck and forearms, but otherwise I’m pretty much done, I hope. Eager to rig and once I know the UVs are locked, start on the shaders/texturing.

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Time to learn texture painting, for seriouses.

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Nearly done mesh, assuming deformation tests don’t make major issues apparent. Gotta clean up ears and finish the mouth and tail, really. Pretty happy how it’s turned out. Not gunna win Character Of The Year but I achieved my goal, which was to put a proper topography on my initial sculpture.

Should start thinking about the shading, but can’t do too much until the mesh is locked down, because I’ll want to do UV mapping.

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I’ve learned a heck of a lot about edge loops and topography and stuff and I’ll go into the technical aspects but goddamn I’ve learned how to create a proper surface with subdivision surfaces and it’s so pretty and smooth I want to pet it.

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Character spin, sub-d mesh (1120 faces) retopographed from the original free sculpt. I don’t know the lingo. It’s not done.

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ah yeah retopography. Done the first pass on the head. Onwards and downwards!