#falgyrac

[beaky-beast]

I managed to figure out particle effects for my girl, so Falgyrac got the rest of her spikes finally. That alone was an interesting learning experience since I learned that:

- Object rotation is important for deciding whether the particle will point away from the mesh its attached to, or lay on its side against it.

- Normal tangent is important for her spikes to work, and the velocity tab’s tangent value needs to be reset to 0 each time I pose her so the spikes don’t roll around.

Outside of that its fun to have a little puppet of her to mess with and play with lighting. The moody gallop pose gets its own turn table since I could not decide on an angle to get all the lighting bits I liked for the life of me.

[beaky-beast]

Better get used to seeing this lady, because I’m not going to be off this bullshit for a while.

I found there were more issues with my initial texture than previously thought, so I rebaked her texture completely and redid her colors with a ref on hand. Evidently there was a light source enabled in the first render that threw off what was supposed to be neutral lighting and made one side brighter than the other. This bake I made sure that was disabled from the render.

I think this outcome is a nice blend of the past two texture attempts, plus the rebake gave me some extra details for her texture.

[beaky-beast]

I went ahead and made a quick experiment regarding the way her texture is colored. Since I baked the texture as greyscale, I could move it into clip studio/photoshop to color it in without worrying about messing with Blender’s texture paint tools.

My first run was just eyedropping her base colors onto another layer and making her texture an overlay to put over it (effectively shading with black and white), this second attempt was taking it into photoshop elements and using the gradient map to color the greyscale by assigning colors to different shades.

admittedly for the second attempt with her texture I went by memory for her colors, and next time I might have her reference on standby to see if I can make it more accurate to how I draw her. However I do like how the gradient map treats the shadows and highlights.

[beaky-beast]

I finally got Falgyrac finished up, or at least to a point for now that I feel like calling her mostly finished. There was some trickery with normal maps and using blender’s shaders to get a texture on her without having to do any real painting. The most that was done in that regard was just setting the greyscale texture render to overlay over her base colors and some minor edits to the greyscale to make it look more presentable.

Evidently my lighting was not centered so there were places that got harsher light than most.

[beaky-beast]

I got a very basic rig down for Falgyrac, but I want to refine it so I can have more control over how she moves and poses. And then... Time for textures! What is here now is more of an object color thing that Blender does, this is not the final coloration/look for her.

In the meantime, have a Le Gasp.

[beaky-beast]

Retopo complete, now to figure out how to get it to attach to the body mesh. This was a good learning experience, since keeping consistent loops is important, and Falgyrac’s head design is a bit all over the place.

That said, the magnetize tool hated it immensely and fought me at every turn.

[beaky-beast]

I got this where I wanted it to be today, I’m probably ready to try and tackle how to do re-topology and get her head ready to be joined with the body mesh.

Interestingly, the sculpt tools act weird with the blades on her face, using flatten on the top will leave pits on the bottom of it. I’m thinking it probably has something to do with how thin they are and generally being something sticking out of the face. Otherwise, sculpting has gone pretty well for a first real try at it in Blender.

[beaky-beast]

I’ve been messing with trying to learn more about how to use Blender instead of floundering around in it.

So far following a tutorial made by someone who works in 3D animation has taught me more than most modeling videos I’ve found on youtube. Such as how to block out a model in low poly before subdividing it into a higher poly model for sculpting.

so here’s a wip Falgyrac that I’m happy enough with so far to share.