Progress

I’m feeling better now than I was last time I posted. Still a bit frustrated, but better. I’ve been doing more sculpting and working on my shaders.

I’m up to version 9 of my watercolour shader now. It’s almost complete, as far as key features. I want to re-add the ambient occlusion into it, but it seems very particular; the threshold needed on the colour ramp to make it show strongly enough is about the different between 0.99 and 1.0.

I’m having problems recently, though….It keeps crashing on me. I spent a day getting frustrated and trying to find out why. It seems it’s to do with the negative space. In real watercolour, to make that you’d most likely isolate a space you want to keep white, like masking it out. I tried to replicate this with my shader by using a factor that mixes the applied colour (silhoutte, shading, etc) with the canvas colour, and removes edge soak and such, so you get your colours with that area preserved.

The trouble is, if you isolated that area, I think you’d get edge soak at the edges of it. At first, I thought i could just pipe in the negative space to the colour mask I use to control shading. That would remove the colour there and it would be put through the same ramp as the silhouette, and get edge soak. It does get edge soak, but because that ramp’s result is used for the alpha, it also means it gets transparent there, which isn’t the desired result. The next logical step, then, would be to just use the edge soak node directly on the negative space and add that to the edge soak of the silhouette, shading etc, itself. But it crashes. Even just using the edge noise, it crashes. If it’s manipulated directly, it crashes. I don’t understand it. I tried debugging it. I tried using the same node combination outside of the node group, and it worked. But inside it, where it needs to be? Crash.

It’s very frustrating. So for the moment, that’s missing from the shader. I think it’s a bug in Blender itself; it seems to be present in 2.82 and 2.90, at the least. I’ll have to try a workaround, like combining it into a colour and seeing if that works when it’s not being manipulated directly.

Because of that, it’s not quite right, but I’ll have to make do right now.

I’ve also been wanting to sketch more. Last night, I had a whim and had a go at sketching Helda from Ascender. Her face is a bit difficult…Very strong and angled, but feminine. I found it fun to sketch, though; I need to sketch more. Recently, I’ve been thinking that I’d like to do more sketches and sculpts that are just there to be sculpts and rendered as such. Not necessarily things that I’ll process to render NPR-style.

Eyes are nice to sculpt. I find them difficult when I’m doing them for an eyeball mesh. But I found after sketching these, it was easy to put one in for a test. I might sketch them first like this from now on before doing the actual mesh eyes. I got some help from Millie with the face proportions, though. She pointed out, I tend to make the noses too short, which is fair. I’m not good at noses; I end up making them too short because I’m worried I’ll make them too long and they’ll look bad. I need to fix that.

Lastly, I’ve been thinking of how I might normal edit my meshes to look better. I was thinking I could isolate the planes of the face using face sets, vertex groups, polygroups, etc.

I tried grabbing them, roughly, on a demo head, and using GoB. I can have it convert them to vertex groups or face sets, but face sets can’t be used with modifiers, so vertex groups are better. This way isn’t very precise, though; I think instead, I’ll just paint the vertex groups in Blender, where possible. I can soften their edges a bit, too, which should help it be a bit smoother, I think.

The Abnormal addon is what most NPR people seem to use these days, but it performs too slowly for me. Maybe because of the meshes I’m using being fairly high poly, but whatever the case, it’s not quick enough. I was thinking of using the normal edit modifier; I can select the vertex groups I need, set up an empty, and have them point at it. It’s non-destructive until applied, and I can rearrange them, add or remove from the group, so that’s helpful. A little bit slow, though. This method also relies on quality topology a bit more, and sometimes, shapes being built into it, so I’ll need to account for that. For my current model, TKB, though, I’ll just use vertex colours to fix his shading.

Hopefully I can post again soon; I’d like to show more sketches and things.