Recently, I’ve been thinking about something in media that really annoys me. It’s about introversion.
A lot of the time, in media, especially western ones, it seems like being an introvert is looked down on. American media seems very problematic with that; treating us like we’re something to be avoided or looked down on. Just look at stuff like The Big Bang Theory; they’re treated as weird for not going out drinking or partying, and their interests, too. It’s always like “You just need to be fixed”. Like having the introvert girl that wears glasses get a makeover into a generic extrovert girl by the end of the film, or “realise” that what she wanted all along was to be an extrovert. Or act like the only reason someone might want to be by themselves or such is because of some trauma, or anxiety.
It really feels like extroverts are running so much of the media. Projecting in their ideas about what people’s lives should be like. Going out all the time, drinking a lot….It sounds utterly exhausting to me. I’m not some shut-in hikikomori, but I don’t want to go out all the time, or drink. They seem to act like that’s a bad thing; that only things like that, nightclubs, etc, are a valid way to have fun.
I especially started thinking of it because of a crappy anime called Uzaki-chan Wants To Hang Out! It presents the male protagonist as if he’s some antisocial guy. But really, he just seems fine by himself. Not needing to be always with someone or spend a lot of time or money. Uzaki…..Who’s creepily, creepily drawn looking like a child with enormous boobs and sexualised to hell, hassles him to take her places or do stuff together, calling him a loser and a loner and generally being a cow. If someone acted like that to me, I’d stop talking to them. But the way it makes it out, it’s just that he needs to be slowly brought of his shell, rather than that she’s dragging him into things. I’ve heard it’s popular. It’s annoying how introverts are so often depicted as needing to be fixed.
This isn’t a very orderly post, or some essay on how or why the depiction is a problem; mostly, I just felt like rambling about it because it’s bothering me. I’d like to see more good depictions of introverts in fiction. Nightclubs and pubs and such aren’t the be all and end all. If someone can have fun by themselves, or doesn’t need to go out that often, what’s wrong with that? If introverts wrote extroverts the way they write us….Actually, they’d probably just end up with the way American media writes extroverts anyway, haha. Going out drinking all the time and sleeping around easily.
I’d much rather be an introvert. At least I don’t need much to enjoy myself.
Unfortunately, my good feelings from the other day dissipated quickly. The last few days, I’ve been quite depressive again. A lot of bad thoughts, and having trouble sleeping. Sometimes, I think I should just give up on trying to sleep and work until I drop; it doesn’t seem to come naturally to me, anyway. And when I’m lying in bed at night unable to sleep, bad thoughts come a lot more easily. I thought about relapsing the other day, just to make them go away. I didn’t, though.
Because of that, my character progress got slowed. I felt very discouraged with them. Especially from looking at videos of people sculpting traditionally. They’re…Absurdly skilled. It made me feel bad about my skills, and the comparatively poor quality of the anatomy on my character models. I have a bit of a complex about my work being digital. It’s not true, but I sometimes feel like “It’s all the computer.” I worry because, if you took away my devices, I wouldn’t be able to produce any images. My skillset is about rendering a 3d, computer graphic of an object, into a stylised 2d image. That’s just not possible in reality. And worrying that even if I did sculpt traditionally, I’d be horrible without the convenient digital tools like move tools, undo, automatic symmetry, etc.
I do want to sculpt traditionally. But I don’t really have the space, unfortunately. Nor anything big enough to bake them in to make them harden. It’s frustrating. I’d really like to be able to sculpt traditionally, too. Maybe I would have less of a complex if I could do that and prove to myself that I can be skilled traditionally, too.
Anyway, so that really stalled me. I still don’t feel good like I did the other week. It doesn’t help my medicine ran out last week; I’ll be getting more soon, at least. In the meantime, I did some assets for Yan to help on AUU. Drawing environments is a good skill….But it’s also time consuming, and repetitive if you’re using the same place a lot. So I wanted to help her by making some reusable assets and environments for AUU. I made a VHS tape, VHS case, VHS player, and an entrance to an apartment.
Clip Studio has a convenient feature. You can bring in 3d assets, then it’ll extract linework from it and use the shading to apply manga-style screentones. When used with 2d drawings, it can blend in quite nicely. I’ve seen a few manga use this technique, too. Since AUU is a fanwork, we can’t devote full time, mangaka-like amounts of time to it, so things like this that save time are useful. I’m quite pleased with how these came out. I put a lot of effort into them. I made the doors with proper hinges, and a letterbox that can be opened and closed, and has a lock. Initially, I did them with armatures, but it seems Clip Studio Modeler doesn’t like non-character meshes to have bones, so I just set them up in a hierarchy using their pivot points in place of bones to keep the movement the same. I used Blender’s Auto Smooth option for the normals, so regardless of the topology, they’d give clean shading. I’d like to look into manual normal editing for hard surface objects, though; I feel like I could push them a bit with a bit of manual alteration.
On the VHS tape, I used booleans to model it. It made it easy to create, for the most part, but cleaning up the geometry after was a bit of a hassle compared to if it had clean, modeled geometry. I also had to remember to convert all resulting ngons into tris; Clip Studio can’t deal with them.
I’m quite pleased with how the TV looks. The linework came out very crisp, I think. Although, the vents on the TV and VHS player make thicker lines. It might be something I could alter if I was more familiar with the software. Or it might be something I could account for when modeling; knowing areas like that are prone to that, perhaps I could just model the impression of it, so that the linework will look better, and possibly do the work of making that shape for me. For example, having a few cuts at the back of the TV instead of full inset vents might produce lines along them that would express the vents. Although, this way if you zoom in it’ll still hold up; that method wouldn’t be suitable for something seen up close.
I enjoyed making these. Hard surface models, to me, aren’t as difficult as characters, and making these for AUU I know I’m doing something to help with it, which makes me feel better than just standing by while my partner does all the hardest work. I’d like to do more, if possible. Environments have also been something on my list of things I want to practice and make more of.
Tomorrow, I want to progress on Bakura again. I should be able to get my medicine, so hopefully I’ll feel more stable and not be so depressed.
Recently, I’ve been working on a model of Thief King Bakura. I feel like I’m finally making some progress. I sculpted him using dynamic topology, and then dynameshed him to smooth out. I used a male base mesh I made, which I’ve saved for use on other models for time saving.
I’ve run into problems with clothes, though. I couldn’t get sufficient quality from ZBrushCore. They’d melt together, and elaborate clothing seemed borderline impossible. So, I decided to try ZBrush full. I’m currently using the trial version, and its features are very convenient. In particular, Zremesher. I had to faff around with it for a while to learn how to make it tick, but I seem to have a decent grip now. Apparently, the trick is to give it less strokes, not more, which tripped me up.
It seems the less, the better. The topology isn’t quite perfect, but very good, and a huge time saver. Up until now, I’ve been using 3DCoat to retopologise the body, then having to manually do the face and awkwardly fuse it on, which takes time and isn’t as clean.
I used this for Bakura’s model. But I’ve realised some mistakes I made while doing so. After retopologising him, I discovered ZBrush seems to only allow you to bake normals from a higher subdivision level to a lower level one. You can’t, apparently, bake from one subtool to the other. I had the high detail, dynameshed TKB model, and wanted to bake them to the low detail retopo TKB model which was a different subtool, and I couldn’t. So on this occasion, I had to bake his normals in Blender. I also couldn’t seem to get the UV Master to work for me. It may be intuitive for some, but I’d rather work with real topology. Manual control would be better for UV mapping.
Anyway, this is the current state of my TKB model in Blender.
This time, I’m relying a lot more on on-model detail. My Maya model relied more on normal maps because I wanted to avoid having too many polygons, but it ended up being too much hassle. And at least this way, I have flexibility; you can always sculpt corrective shape keys for muscle movements on the fly, but a normal map is stone. You can swap it out, but it’s not truly dynamic. So I’m only going to use it for minimal things. I know the Guilty Gear Xrd method, which is popular, does it all with real geometry, but I don’t think that’s practical for everything. Not all details would have a solid start and end point. Scars can often fade out, for example.
Currently, I’m working on his shaders. I need to sort out the paper texture, fix the shading edge soak, and add masks to define differently coloured areas, like his scars. I also intend to modify the normals this time, so I don’t have to correct as much using vertex paints. Since the performance doesn’t seem fast, those kinds of changes are sluggish and difficult. I’m not really satisfied with my shader, but right now making stuff is more important. I feel like I’m making progress fighting my perfectionism. I see a lot of flaws with his model, but I haven’t let myself stop and go backwards.
I don’t want to go backwards. I want to go forwards.
I didn’t remember to record to show my process while working on this, but I do have previous versions as subtools, so I decided to make a gif to show the profession. It’s something that encourages me, too. Looking back at the progression of it from a blob to something looking reasonably like a person. I like to watch timelapses like that sometimes. I’m really interested seeing different artists’ techniques.
While working on Bakura, I was listening to some music from a drama I’ve been watching with Yan, Crash Landing On You. It’s actually very good, and has a nice soundtrack.
These tracks really remind me of citronshipping, somehow. Especially Picnic…It makes me think of nice scenes with Bakura and Malik relaxing at home, bantering, doing things together, having fun….Making Bakura start to realise that life has things worth living for in it, too. That’s something I want to show. After I finish Bakura, I’m going to make Malik to go with him, haha.
Speaking of things I like to see, I’ve been watching videos from a channel recently called DokiDoki Drawing. It’s a Japanese channel focusing on art.
I’ve been really enjoying their Pro VS Amateur videos. It’s nice to see different ways they approach things, and it’s quite informative when the professionals explain things about their choices, like things they do for balance, emphasis, style, etc. I’m not a 2d artist, but it is enjoyable seeing them talk about it. It might be better for me that way; if they were 3d artists, I’d probably feel bad about my skills watching them. They also seem to have a good variety of people on it; foreigners as well as Japanese people, amateurs and professional mangakas, etc. It makes me a bit more motivated seeing people’s progress. And they don’t take themselves too seriously; I remember them joking in one video that a cyberpunk design came out more steampunk. Not getting angry about it or taking things too seriously and losing the fun of it.
Uchida Shinnosuke in those videos has interested me; she’s appeared in a few. From what they’ve mentioned, it seems she particularly enjoys and focuses on cyberpunk. But cyberpunk isn’t very popular in Japan at the moment, it seems. But instead of ditching what she really enjoys, she continues to do it, and aims for the people who do enjoy it. That’s something that’s nice to see. Too often, people act like you should just forget what you like and go for some…Mass market appeal. I hate that kind of thing. I can understand incorporating elements that give something wider appeal. That can be a savvy move, sometimes, I think, but to ditch everything I’m interested in just for that? It would be a pointless endeavour. So it’s nice to see someone like her persisting with the genre she finds interesting regardless of whether or not it’s currently in fashion. I’m also quite fond of cyberpunk, from what I’ve seen, so that helps, haha.
Anyway, I have more to do. I think I will invest in ZBrush full. I can’t afford to buy it outright right now, so I’ll have to cough up to subscribe for a few months and save my pennies. Being able to bypass the pain in the arse stuff like retopology is a godsend. It’s not a creative step…It’s just a pain in the arse technical one. I also spent some time on my body deform cage. I’ve added IKs to the legs and arms and spine. They’re not super complicated ones, but they make it easier to pose. They were difficult to set up; I haven’t done them before now.
I’m sure animators are cringing. Or anyone with any decent experience rigging, haha. But it’s a step up. I’ll need to fix the deform cage, but as long as the bones work.
That’s all I have to show for now. This post became a bit of a ramble….But it’s good to talk like that, I think. I don’t want my blog to be just some formal thing.
Next up, Bakura’s clothes and hair. I’m going to try something a bit different this time.
Riya's NPR Log 