Changing is Hard…

This year, I’ve really been wanting to improve. Not just technically, as always, but mostly in terms of my output. Finishing models and not being so perfectionist about them and scrapping them like I have done in the past. I’ve been working hard on that, but it’s very difficult. I realised, at some point my goal just slipped. I started just wanting to make art of the characters I liked, and then it became “Make good(TM) art”. I got into the habit, and lost so much time just studying and redoing.

I’ve been trying to change that this year, but, to my horror, it’s already March. Almost the end of March. I’m honestly not sure where the time went; it seemed like it was just January. I’ve been bogged down with bad mental health and work, and somehow the time slipped right past me. Seeing that, I wanted to push myself. So I decided to make another model. This time, I wanted to try two things. One, making a slimmer base mesh that’s easy to transform into what I need, and two, making a model of Heat.

I’d been struggling a lot in technical ways. Things like, the massive difference between the density requirements for a head and the body. Keeping important details without having to dynamesh the whole thing to a heavy and hard to smooth polycount. How best to make a reusable basemesh without leaving it too rough and undefined; having solid anatomy but also making it soft enough to be versatile. These kinds of things cause me a lot of frustration. I often wish that it was more like real clay might be. Reality doesn’t have a polycount; if you want to smooth something, you can just smooth it. Or tricky angles; you can just rotate your model with one hand, and your tool with the other. The angle you’re using isn’t view-dependent. I found, surprisingly, that it felt like it would be a lot easier if only it was a bit of clay in my hands.

Still, I did try. I made a relatively basic mesh. Just defining the anatomy a bit, but not going overboard.

I’m still crap at legs, and struggle to soften forms in a way consistent with skin. Just using the smooth tool is insufficient; the effect of skin isn’t just smoothing it. It also fills in the gaps, and, with some things like back muscles, for example, can make them seem to take on a different shape, or connect into other muscles that they’re not attached to. It’s very difficult.

But from there, I was able to build it up into a more muscular body. It’s a bit more muscle than the character I was aiming for actually has, but I’ll call it artistic licence.

I’m actually fairly happy with the torso. It has problems, but it’s not terrible, exactly. The legs aren’t good, though.

The head, hands, and feet, were ones I made separately and attached. I had trouble here. The resolution the body needs to get a reasonably level of detail is only about half, or maybe 2/3, of what the head will need. If you dynamesh the head to match the body, you can’t get an adequate level of detail. But if you dynamesh the body to match the head, if you want to tweak things, it becomes more difficult. And it results in a larger file size, making saving and loading more of a hassle. At times like this, I’m very envious of traditional sculptors. To sculpt without ever having to think about a polygon count or something technical like that would be lovely.

It’s also hard when you have to make a mouth cavity, and eye cavities to make them something you can rig. It’s difficult to do those without losing parts of your original face structure, mouth shape, etc, I’ve found. Still, I did that as best I could, and then moved onto clothing and armour.

That’s an area I’m still incredibly weak at; I just don’t have much experience, and the logic of the way clothes are put together, and fold and crease, is completely different from muscles and bones. I’m also not sure, when it comes to technicality, how to put it together. A lot of things would be easier if I only had to consider them as a statue. But models for posing are completely different. I made most of the parts I needed, though they’re not good. The leg parts, I just became frustrated and did a very simplified version. I wasn’t satisfied with it, but it was still something.

Then the last problem was topology. I’d found before that automatic retopology wasn’t quite reliable enough, giving me so-so results in important areas. I thought it would be best to at least do the face manually, but because it was too hard to attach a manual face to a mid poly model, I ended up just manually retopologising the whole thing. It was good practice, but horrible; it takes much too much time, and the ZSphere retopology ZBrush allows didn’t work well on the hands and feet. I ended up having to do them separately and awkwardly attach them.

I later did some tests; it might be better next time if I just do a very low poly auto retopology on the body, make a manual head and attach it, then modify the topology manually as needed and subdivide to the resolution I need. Either that, or I’d have to suck up ZRemesher’s really high poly results.

The trouble with that is performance. In the end, after all that effort, I ended up not even being able to use my model, ugh. The polycount needed to keep most of the details from my model seemed to cause Blender to choke. It kept freezing up on me, and then just crashed outright, without even freezing. It can’t seem to handle it at all. Ever since 2.8, the performance has been bad, and it looks like the recent version is even worse.

If I can’t even do anything with the model, it might as well be a statue, and then I wouldn’t have had to bother with topology or any of that in the first place. It’s incredibly frustrating to have spent my days off on it and then have the software screw me over. If it can’t even handle the character, how will it handle it rigged, in an environment?

So, I’m feeling very frustrated. Wondering why I bothered if it can’t even handle it after all I did. I’m feeling torn. I sometimes just want to give up….But I really want to sculpt and make art. I’m not really sure what I should do. I need to think it over and work out how to make things work, or if I should just give up on it, or change things a lot.

Losing Sight

This year, I’m really wanting to make more art. I also want to make better quality art. To that end, I spent a lot of January trying to learn GLSL. I’ve started using the new renderer, Malt, to give me a lot more flexibility in the way I render. It took me several weeks of learning and experimenting, but I was finally able to more or less replicate my existing watercolour shader in Malt.

It’s quite convenient in some ways. It can do a lot, and in real time. Some of its features, like the linework, were available in Toonkit, but so much slower. I suspect, if Malt catches on and adds more basic shaders to use, it’ll kill Toonkit by virtue of the fact that it can do anything that can and more, and hundreds of times more quickly.

Unfortunately, though, I realised I’ve had a big blind spot. I tried making a Ryou model, but…It’s just shit.

The only good thing about it at all is the hair. I like the hair. I learned how to use curve-based hair better this time. But that’s all. The model itself is very flawed, the topology isn’t great, the normal editing is choppy, the clothing is simple, the colours aren’t good, the shader didn’t come out right….It’s just bad.

I realised, while trying to finish this for the sake of having it done, rather than dropped, that I’ve had serious tunnel vision for a long time, sigh. I’ve been so fixated on the quality and flexibility of the shaders that I didn’t focus at all on the fundamentals.

The topology is inadequate. It’s dense where it doesn’t necessarily need to be, it doesn’t flow as cleanly as I’d like, and it isn’t convenient for normal editing. I’d been leaving it up to the Zremesher, but I think that may actually have been a mistake. I did some practice, and…There really is nothing quite as clean as hand-placed topology.

I tried doing some manual retopology on a head I’d made. I like the result a lot better. It looks cleaner, and because it’s a subdivision surface, I can spend less time on the topology and still have it match the dynamesh properly. It seems I can also edit the topology of an existing mesh, as long as it’s under 15,000 points. I’m thinking that from now on, I might just use Zremesher for the body, and then do the head, and maybe the hands, myself. It would make it much easier to get good topology while accounting for the shapes needed for good normal editing, I think. But it does take a bit more time, unfortunately.

Then my other main problem is clothes. I’ve focused a lot trying to learn anatomy, but not enough on fabrics. How to model them properly, make them look right. I’m near clueless at that.

Then there’s rigging, which I’m incredibly weak at, and because I’m bad at that, the posing is bad, because the rigs aren’t good and the weights aren’t optimal.

I need to do so much learning in these areas….The best shader in the world won’t make a badly modeled, stiffly rigged mesh look good. I don’t know how I overlooked that….I’m really angry with myself for fixating so much and forgetting my fundamentals. I need to change…Basically everything.

So for now, I’m planning to just focus on my models. I’ll do some renders, I think, but only as 3D renders. Not worrying about NPR for now, just the quality of the models, the rigging, themselves. I need them to be better for the renders to be better. I’m so stupid…Losing sight of something so obvious.

I’ll work hard on revisiting the fundamentals for now, and make as many good models as I can.

AUU Assets, Downward Spells

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.