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.