Two thirds of the way through the challenge, now, and I’m starting to feel pretty good about my progress. I’m still very far from amazing, but I at least feel like I’m not entirely awful.
So today’s practice was a bit of an off the cuff, no live references (I glanced over some images beforehand), no real plan version of a studio Ghibli style tree spirit inspired… thing. Wow, is that enough qualifiers?
He’s both kind of cute and utterly hideous at the same time. But, I think I’m getting better at the tools and the strategies involved, and I managed to have some fun putting together the materials for him.
Eventually I want to use something along these lines for some characters in Runic Alchemy, but I want to find my own design variation. I don’t think this one will be the winner, but that does mean that I’ll probably end up making a few more of these before I’m done.
In a way, I guess I was kicking it old school with today’s practice session. I decided to take some time and go through one of the first blender tutorials I stashed away when I started this project, this modern leather chair on the CG Masters channel from back in 2015.
In the end I didn’t end up following the tutorial exactly, I went with my own design for the legs, and skipped the additional support straps for the chair entirely (but since you’re only seeing it from the front you’d never know if I hadn’t just fessed up 😉 ).
With as much time as I’ve been pouring into sculpting lately it seemed like it would be a good idea to do something a little bigger than the bits of my sky scene for some decent modeling practice. That said, I’ve been pouring through a character modeling and sculpting class on CGCookie, so there may be a lot more of that coming up in the near future.
Alright, I know I haven’t been posting many progress images lately, and I feel bad about that, so I thought today I’d go ahead and at least try to get some reportable progress on a couple of these pieces, instead of just practice progress.
Here I’ve got my enhancements to the sky battle scene. Why can’t these guys get along? Don’t they see how much they’ve got in common? It’s just silly.
For anyone not wanting to bother looking up the original WIP image, I’ve added some happy little trees, a few houses, a couple of water towers, and of course, some very unhappy citizens. It’s possible that this one is actually complete, I’m not sure what else I want to add to it. I may go ahead and put together another low poly scene, maybe one without the people in it so I can go with a lower scale and have more room to work with.
The other thing I’ve been working on, of course, is my sculpting skills. In this case via the sculpt of the jogger that I showed off in an early form a few days ago. So here’s the updated version with the various changes and refinements, as well as some super basic colorization materials. Like the sky battle, I may be ready to call this one finished. I’m sure I could put a lot more work into it, get her really nice, but it’s probably more beneficial from a practice standpoint to call her done and do something new. That being said I’d still like to come back to her, maybe use the sculpt as practice for some retopology so I can get her properly posed.
Finally, I feel like I’ve hit a bit of a breakthrough on the game development front. Not much of one, really, I guess. But a breakthrough none the less. I think I’ve finally worked out a viable system for properly generating the in-game user interfaces in a way that will work smoothly and be easy to use and extend. And that’s going to go a long way toward having something nice and playable.
Since I managed to make some coding progress on the game I decided to dedicate my 3d work time toward making some new game assets as well. I’ve been needing an updated version of the game’s main location for a while now, so I went ahead and modeled that, as well as another of the game components that I’ve been faking with basic primitives. I don’t really need those at this stage of the production, but it was a pretty simple model to make, so I figured, why not get it done?
Nothing rendery to post up today, I’m afraid, but I wanted to go ahead and throw those updates out there.
Just a quick update today, no new images to post yet.
I spent some time today looking into the viability of switching over to doing audio book narration as a main source of income, just to see. While the career sounds nice and would no doubt be full of opportunities, I don’t think it’s viable for me for the time being. It’s a skill that is definitely going to need work, and may even get its own 30/30 in the future, but I don’t think I’ll be getting paid in the process of improving those skills.
On the Blender front I watched though a couple of the starting classes on modeling cartoon faces, though I don’t know if I’m going to actually implement that for a bit. For my actual practice for today I went back to my jogger sculpt from yesterday. I fixed up some of the proportions, fixed the hoodie and added some nice details to actually make it look more like a real hoodie, and I added hands. It’s only the second time I’ve really tried to model hands, and I can’t say that it really went better, but I think it at least turned out better. That’s maybe not saying much since the previous attempt landed the character with the moniker “Creepy Hands”, but improvement is improvement. There’s more improvement to be made, and I really have to work on my process, but I’ll take whatever progress I can get.
I was also reminded that it is really important to make sure that your model is of a decent size when sculpting. I’m using the rigify plug-in’s human meta-rig armature as a base proportion guide, and I guess when you add the rig it comes into the scene on the tiny side, so my model was scaled to match. I was starting to suspect something was wrong when I was having to crank my detail levels up super high to get something I could actually work with, and for the hands I had it set higher than I’ve ever tried it, and I still couldn’t manage to get a smooth surface going. When I decided to try scaling the model up my smoothing and shaping problems went away. I was even able to go back and add more detail to the face. I think I took her from too small to technically too big (she’s around 60 feet or something at the moment, I think), but I can always scale her back down to actual human size after the fact.
In preparing for the VLog entry (you’re watching the vlog, right?) I was harshly reminded at how very little work output I’ve managed to create over the last five days. This is not really an indication of how little work I’ve done, on the contrary I feel like the last several days have been some of the busiest of the journey so far, but they certainly haven’t been the most productive.
That being said, I think it’s just possible that the practice is starting to pay off. Just a bit, mind, just a bit. But tonight I think I managed to actually sculpt something vaguely acceptable.
She’s still very much a work in progress, like so many of the things I’ve been working on for the last few days, many of which are likely just complete lost causes. But at least with this one even the unfinished state is close enough to adequate to be worth showing off a bit. Decent enough that she’s actually worth polishing up, at least. She’s still missing her hands and eyes, and there’s plenty of detail work that still needs to be done, not to mention the possibility of texturing and even posing if I can manage to get a rig to work with the mesh.
What’s exciting is that I managed to get her to this point in about an hour and a half, which is both way faster than things have been going, and with a much better outcome, so I guess the unsalvageable sculpts at least served their purpose. Maybe it won’t even be too long before I look at this one and cringe at how bad it is compared to my newer stuff. I guess we’ll see.
I had planned on doing some more traditional modeling in the form of new additions to my low-poly scene, but the sculpt practice ended up eating up all my time, so I’ll have to save the new additions to that one for later.
All in all, I think I’m reaching the halfway point of this 3d 30/30 feeling pretty decent about the rate of progress. I probably wouldn’t have said that yesterday, and I may not tomorrow, but for right now, things are looking pretty good.
In other news, I actually managed to make some progress on Runic Alchemy, popping in a nice upgrade to the game’s UI. Customizable auto-creating buttons everywhere, based on the game button image I shared a couple of weeks ago. So many more art assets needed to really complete the UI, but it’s a beginning at least.
It’s funny, it seems like I managed to squeeze in a decent amount of practice time today, and worked on several different things, and yet at the end of the day I have nothing to show off. Everything I’ve got going on at the moment is a work in progress.
I guess that’s the thing about 3d work, the really interesting stuff takes a lot longer to do. Same with 2d, really. All art. Though in this particular case I don’t even have partial or proper Work In Progress style images that I can really share. You saw my low poly scene yesterday, it’s further along now, but no so much as to be worth looking at. My new environment scene includes some crazy involved textures and is taking a long while to set up, so there’s not much worth looking at there yet either. And I’ve embarked on a new practice sculpt that I’m hoping will be a bit more attainable, but it’s still very much in the early “oh my word don’t look at that” phase.
Today’s plan was to get back to basics. I’m back up to the Blender Modeling bootcamp classes on CGCookie, and since they start off at fairly near the beginning, I’m going back and doing the same. It’s good to make sure you have a firm foundation, anyway.
So with that in mind, here’s my coffee mug and saucer. I went ahead and tried to get some extra practice and learning in on this one, since I’ve technically modeled a mug before, by going in deeper with the materials on the mug and on the tabletop. I think it came out fairly nice. I’m considering going back to add in some other elements to the scene, maybe a banana or a bagel or something, but I think it’s ok for now.
And to follow that up I spotted a neat looking little tutorial series on youtube that was talking about low poly environment rendering. It looked both like it would be fun and also a good way to bust out a lot of modeling in a fairly short amount of time. So of course I’m nowhere near finished with my scene.
This is what I’ve got so far. I *may* have gone a little more in depth with the pipes than the tutorial did, but it seemed like a good way to practice using the curve and array modifiers, and I know that that is a technique that I really want to get a handle on. It’s the same basic technique that I used for creating the wire in my amulet the other day. I still have some things to figure out around getting the settings just right to make that work fast, but its still probably going to be faster than setting up all of the individual pipe pieces by hand. Unfortunately working through that process took up all of my remaining time, so I haven’t gotten to any of the other features of my little sky towns here, or the story that they are about to tell. This may also end up being a multi-day project, but I don’t think it will be one I eventually just have to scratch, so that’s nice.
So, honestly, sculpting is really really hard. Or rather it’s really easy to do, but difficult to do well? Something like that. What I am saying is that this is a skill that is going to take just an incredible amount of practice, or at least that’s how it seems right now. Of course, that’s kind of the point of all of this, if these were skills that I could just sit down and learn in a day then I wouldn’t need to devote full months just to learning the basics.
That being said, the modeling project I’ve been working on may have to get shelved for later. While I’m assuming its been good practice, I’m also very strongly getting the impression that it is way beyond my current skill level, and that continuing to bang my head against it is just going to be counterproductive, both for my learning curve and my morale. Someday I’ll come back and conquer it, but sadly today is not that day.
And with *that* being said, I was prepared to end out the day, and this blog entry with a few more hours of practice under my belt, several more training videos watched, but otherwise nothing to show for the day’s work. And then I realized what day it was, and I knew what I had to do.
After all, you should always know where your towel is.
Now, I can’t claim full credit for this. I did make it, but I was very closely following this tutorial. Still, following tutorials doesn’t always get you the best of results and I did go with my own color scheme, so that should count for something.
Nothing to show off today, not because I skipped work or anything, amazingly I still have not missed a single day in these challenges. No, I spent a couple of hours working on my new sculpture. I am really, really looking forward to reaching a skill level where I can just bust something like that out, without having to go back and work and rework individual sections to try to get something that looks reasonable. As it is I’m only done with the first blocking phase of the sculpt, just getting the main shapes down with no real detail. But, it is good practice, and you have to make mistakes before you can really learn to avoid them.
I’d like to say that I’ll be able to show off my results tomorrow, but I honestly don’t think I’ll have it completed then either. Maybe, it looks like I may have a bit more time to work on it than I would normally. We’ll have to see.
As far as the other part of the challenge, the video tutorials and classes, I *may* have cheated just a bit. Since I’m still working on my sculpt I bypassed the usual class structure and watched one of their other tutorial videos, specifically one on how to model wings. It introduced some different techniques that I haven’t come across before, so I’m glad I did. I’m still going to count it, though, even if it isn’t directly in the course path.
He’s both kind of cute and utterly hideous at the same time. But, I think I’m getting better at the tools and the strategies involved, and I managed to have some fun putting together the materials for him.
