July ProgBlog #2: shiny froof
Finally finished the gloss map for the scales! The belly scales were fairly boring and straightforwrd but I was still glad to be done with them XD Currently lighting the froof and am much happier as I like doing hair. Quite pleased with how it's turning out so far too.
A little bit blurry up this close and I don't think it should be. I'm currently writing myself some pipeline notes (not as I type obviously because I'm kind of typing this XD) including just making the model a lot bigger (as much as I really, really don't want to) because for whatever reason the SceneScale either doesn't work in the paint room or doesn't work at all.
I've taken off the shadow layer for now (Sprat's suggestion as I was unsure about what I'd done so asked her opinion and she said she preferred it without) and it's looking all right. I have one more method with the diffuse layer to try and if that doesn't work out I think I'll leave it off.
I'm also contemplating an AO map but as I've never done one before I'm not sure how hacky it's going to end up. But as I'm saving out all the maps separately it will at least be easiest to get rid of if it doesn't look good in Blender.
I had a moment of not being sure if I should be annoyed or not as I realised at some point that the sculpt details hadn't come over into the normal map, but couldn't remember if I'd done that deliberately and was going to paint the normal map by hand because I was having some serious smoothing issues (could not get the sculpt mesh smooth no matter what I did, there were always these bumps everywhere that simply refused to foad) or whether I'd just screwed up the bake. After playing around with a fork of the model where I was intending on baking a normal map and importing it back in, I eventually decided I needed to just normal map the fingernails in (most of what I need to displace) and fix up any shape issues in Blender as I started playing around with the sculpt too much (which would cause problems for the retopo model and probably the maps).
Once I'm done stuffing around with this one there's the phoenix on the other side, her arm scars, fingernails and toenails (ergh I better check Red to make sure I did that as I can't remember, I may have to redo bits of him anyway) and then she's off to Blender to see if the skin shader I made in Blender will work out better than painting in 3dC or not.
Only vaguely related, I recently got this song stuck inside my head (embedded the Spirit one because the official one apparently reminds Sprat of the screaming man meme).
Now apparently I can evict it by doing a sketchdump of three couples being cutesy and coupley (I think I'm trying to tell me I need to make up for a lot of conflict and angst over the last few years XD) but what it actually wants is something that's possibly a bit too spoilerific (and I actually don't mind just showing whatever and spoiling everything but I have had some indication from Patreons and others that people that are interested in my project generally don't want spoilers) so Sprat's the only one that's going to get to see it til some indeterminate time in the future when it will be safe to display to everyone (and by that stage I will probably have redrawn it or will have all the models required for the scene to be able to do a 3d render).
I edited the post on my blog to say that I forgot to add last night, it would be really cool if more musicians (established as well as new) would get on steem. I'd love to be able to make them post beneficiaries if I do music videos or want to include some of their tracks as part of my streaming soundtracks, and it's statistically unlikely that I'm the only one.
This post also appears on my blog.
Want a crowd character? If you interact frequently with me here (either on my posts or your posts or better yet both!) or on one of the linked Discord channels, all you have to do is let me know and tell me what you'd like :) It can be one of your characters (including ones you make up on the spot for this XD) or a self insert. There's a bunch of different human types to choose from, and pets/other animals are also welcome.
Thanks for looking! ^_^
Come hang out on Discord with us!
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I didn't get much of the technical stuff you're on about, but there was a promise of a Phoenix to come!
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Phoenix is on the other arm :)
At this stage I'm probably going to paint the body like short hair (as much as I can manage anyway as I'm struggling to make the brush small enough for the dragon froof and the feathers are smaller), the tail froof like longer hair and see what I can manage with the feathers. But as usual I'll see what happens when I start XD
So... 3dCoat have painting layers feature? I wish Blender have that because, well, it should. I'm getting more and more curious about how this character's look in the final render. Keep at it, Ry, force your tired hands to keep working XD
Yep, you have the types of paint layers in 3dC that you generally have in a paint program (that isn't Paint XD). I think I vaguely recall someone saying a similar thing (ages ago now) about how Blender should have paint layers but there was a lot of pushback saying Blender should focus on modelling and animation and that complicated texture work should be done in a proper paint program.
I remember reading arguments against layer based painting inside Blender, the people arguing against it insisted that all texture painting should be done in painting programs and that Blender is a modelling/animation app and should just do those things really well and nothing that would detract from those things should even be considered XD (okay so I'm paraphrasing and exaggerating a lot). In all seriousness layer based painting can get pretty heavy especiallyif you do it like I do (I have had my layer index in Krita numbering in the hundreds but as it keeps incrementing and I sometimes delete some I'm not sure how accurate it is) so I can understand why some may feel that it might not be in Blender's best interests. If they were able to find some way to incorporate it well without everything else blowing up or lagging then I think they'd just about have everything in one package.
Still doing froof, but it's going slow as I'm also doing a lot of data entry stuff at the same time x_x (transposing and occasionally rewriting/fleshing out my extensive notes from an sql dump from a Wikimedia instance that had to be opened in Libreoffice because it turned out to be over 200 pages long into a Drupal instance)
Argued about how adding painting layer is a bad idea.
A few releases later...
Added advanced grease pencil animation feature 'with' grease pencil painting layers.
...Ok.
Actually, you can make your own layers through the node editor, someone made a video of that. But it's not as easy as having an actual layer feature.
I hope this will be made in the future. At least community-made addon would be nice. Because there are people who (for some reason) likes painting in Blender even if they can get other painting programs such as Substance Painter.
Since they are able to add more and more features with 2.8, if they can't figure out how to make painting layers work I'm telling the adult >:(
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