Today I made some good progress in finding the rendering style for the Oskar stories.
I like the gray-shadowed version, but my goal is to stick to pure black/white with some sort of raster effect for shading.
Tech details:
Just Blender’s bog-standard Line-rendering, a texture layer painted within the program, and no Compositing tricks. I also plan to incorporate Grease Pencil drawings in the final style, but since that takes a bunch of extra effort to render and composit I save it for later.
Here I’m just playing around with layers of the original render.
An attempt to recreate my dear electric bass. Modeling about 80% done… in Blender, as usual. I’m not sure how the topology of the body will work out when I round out the shape, but I find the edge flow pattern rather pretty.
A few days ago Blendernation linked to Grant Parsley I’ve done a few experiments with texture painting in Blender (and Mudbox and, WOE, Maya) before, but his stuff got me started exploring it again.
Since I started using Blender, the tools for doing this have been improved in a couple of ways.
First, the Texture Paint Layer Manager addon gives some very smooth handling of the different texture images/layers. Switching between painting color, transparency, bump mapping etc is as easy as clicking a button. Adding new layers, same thing.
Second, the Texture Paint Plus addon provides a fantastic W-key popup to access most relevant brush settings, as well as other general painting workflow improvements. Also – drawing straight lines with shift, which is great.
About the painting itself… eh, well, sorry about that. Let’s say I want to get used to the tools so I’ll be ready when I want to produce something worthwhile. I was really fun to do, though. Real-time bump map painting just has a great feeling to it.
Another quick model + rig. It went a bit smoother than the one I did yesterday, but still took slightly over two hours. A fair bit more limbs to worry about, obviously.
I never really managed to form a good visual image of the Spiders in Vernor Vinge’s A Deepness in the sky, which I read recently. I didn’t really think about it when modeling this, but it was probably somewhere in the back of my mind.
The plan was to model and rig a simple character within an hour. Got a bit lost in IK-land (and a couple of other places), so it became more like 2,5 hours. Animation and rendering trickery… another 2, I guess.
I really DO want to get modeling and (manual) rigging down to a steady hour though. To get basic character concepts up and running, or churn out very basic but unique background characters.
Worth mentioning: It’s actually pretty easy to continue modeling in Blender without breaking the rig-skinning too much. In the above animation, it’s even really just half a model, with a Mirror modifier to copy it symmetrically.
I hadn’t really planned to do more with this character, but maybe I should use him to stress-test this “continue modeling a rigged character” claim. And of course – it’s another sculpting base mesh to play with!
Some general sketches of Tom Waits, mixed with more straight-up portrait photo redrawings. I'm aiming at a 3d version further ahead, so I'm really just familiarizing myself witht the facial features. "I'm not really there yet", to put it really mildly.
I find it hard to stop tweaking digital sketches, but all the possiblities to do so can really be a counterproductive trap. Self-imposed time limitations is one method, and it's good. But it does kinda dodge the necessity to JUDGE when to stop, and how much time to spend on each step or detail.
Eh, anyway. Done in Paint. I really really really like Paint for black and white sketching. No fancy possibilites to get lost in, no lag, no layers... just the basic tools to get the shapes and line down. And crudely move them around, if necessary.
I don't plan to post every darn sketch I do here, but it'll probably be a steady source of filler content.
Freehand self portrait in Blender’s sculpt mode. Glanced at the mirror now and then, otherwise it’s just guesswork and sculpting along. Learning how wrinkles actually form and work is another thing on the to-learn list, but at this point I’m just getting used to the tools.
TECH
What I’ve learned: Mostly technical little details. The nicest discovery was that extra edgeloops could be thrown into the model without messing the sculpt up too much. And that 600000-something faces is the roof for Blender-sculpting on my laptop. And that was painfully laggy.
Next time I’ll aim for a roughly 2000 poly base-model, which should land on 512000 at subdivision level 4. And possibly be sculptable on a more powerful computer/optimized blender version, at 2 million.
Material/lighting is purely matcaps, and having that solution around is quite wonderful. I took the opportunity to try a few out for the rendering for this post.
Using a matcap material basically means that both lighting-setup and material for an object is derived from a single image of a ball. This is calculated super-quick, so the looks in the video can be used in real-time while sculpting.
/TECH
Also, I LOVE ANIMATION. And I don’t mean the high art of believable character blah blah, but just sticking rigs into stupid stuff and making it move.
Eh. This is kinda embarrasing to throw out here, but I guess that's one of the points of the blog. Whip up something good, get to be proud. Fail, face the shame.
I had about 15 minutes to try to get something done, but at least I didn't play it completely safe. This is the first time I tried the legendary "clay strip" style of digital sculpting, and I really really liked it.
encn - dailyweekly 