Category: Personal

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.

Serph, Perfectionism, 2021

I haven’t posted in quite a while. But actually, I’ve been sculpting a lot recently.

Around the end of this last year, I think I reached a breaking point with my perfectionism. It got to be so frustrating. Back when I started taking sculpting seriously, I was always wanting to get better. To make what I could sculpt match what I could imagine. But, because of that, I got frustrated time and time again. I was constantly scrapping things, and redoing them, and then scrapping that, too. And then I would hate myself for not finishing it, but I’d hate myself for what it was and think it wasn’t worthy of being finished anyway. Thinking back…It was a very toxic cycle. I don’t know if I can say I’ve escaped that. But…I am trying.

I felt like making some Digital Devil Saga fan art a while ago. I made a model of Serph, and some sketches of others. Serph, being the leader and player character, I decided to focus on first and use for practice. I’ve actually learned a lot from this.

For starters, I used one of my base meshes again. I think I improved a bit on the legs, but they’re still not good.

I had a lot of trouble making his armour. Clothes in general, I’m not very experienced with. Let alone armour that doesn’t exist in real life. I ended up researching quite a bit on ways ZBrush artists make them; I ended up finding different, potentially better ways I could have done them after the fact, gah. I ended up having to do some elements in Blender, mainly those round elements. I don’t know what they are, so I couldn’t reference well. The jacket was also a challenge; it’s symmetrical in overall shape, but the zip goes across it diagonally rather than down the middle. Fortunately, ZBrush had just updated with a slice tool for the Zmodeler, so I was able to use that to cut the zip in. I used Zbrush’s default stuff for the zips, but I don’t like to do that, so afterwards I looked it up and learned how to make my own. Next time, I’ll use those instead.

The armour isn’t well done, honestly. The polygon density is all over the place; just compare the jacket to the sleeves, or the boots. It feels tacked together, which it kind of was. I felt clumsy trying to model it. I need to gain experience and skill with that, and make a better go of it next time I make clothes and armour.

I did try some different things this time, though. I found the Zremeshed model was too dense and slow, so I needed to keep detail, but on a lower poly mesh. I found out I could use a tool to draw lines on the model and convert them into polygroups, and use those to help guide the remesh, so I tried that.

It was actually quite effective. I’ll need to play with it more next time and see if I can learn how to make it tick most effectively. I think a careful combination of that and Zremesher guide lines should give a good result. I need it to be relatively low poly; Blender, since 2.8, doesn’t have great performance.

On another note, I tried something different with the shading, too. It seems, in the NPR community, people either use Abnormal or the data transfer modifier right now to get good shading. But, Abnormal is too slow for me to use on anything like this. And the data transfer…It is handy, but I can’t get to like it. It’s so…Uncontrolled. You just have to hope it gives you what you need. And, because it’s going off of geometry positions, you can’t really do anything that’s too far away from it, or super wonky. Limits.

So, this time, I tried painting vertex groups and using the Normal Edit modifier.

Each group was related to a vector. It’s a bit similar to what anime-style NPR artists had done, but they can get away with a bit more, because they’ve been using simpler, generally more moe, styles. But building straight into your topology has problems; if it’s simple in or out of the vertex group, it has a hard edge, so the light will suddenly snap. And if you use any gradients with it, you’ll have an area that gradually lightens as the light is rotated, but where the lit area remains all the same, looking unnatural.

Those also can get away with a bit more. Like using one vector for one side of the face, and one for the other; in a cel-shaded style, a sharp crease in the middle of the face isn’t necessarily so bad, but not good here, so I had to make several. A front, front-side, and side. I could make even more if I wanted to, but I think blending between those is enough.

By using weight paints, I could give it smooth shading at the end. While I was working on it, I used a hard-edge weight paint brush; no need to make it smooth by blurring until I knew it was going to be good. Although, next time I could build the shapes into the topology a bit, too, and just smooth out their edges. Although I’m not too fond of that idea; it seems like it could mess with the deformation in animation.

It took a while, since it’s my first time trying this method, but I was satisfied with the results.

I really liked the face shading here. Although, it’s difficult to get it right from all angles.

I also did some normal editing on his armour; this is an incomplete version, which you can tell from the face being non-smooth. On the armour, I tried for a bit of a simpler version. Just a front, back, left and right group. I think it made it more prone to being dark, though. I tried to follow the shape of the armour. I’ll have to practice this more. But, I liked how it came out, mostly.

I’m also on V10 of my shader. Right now, I’m using Toonkit for Cycles. It’s convenient in some ways. It lets you isolate the shading of a specific light, and it lets me use an outline, which I used to make a softer edge, that won’t mess up like fresnel.

The trouble is, as it’s cycles, it’s a lot slower. It also doesn’t give me any way to account for reflections, unlike Eevee. I think I could replicate it in Malt/BEER using GLSL, given a bit of time, but I tried it and the performance was shockingly bad. It seems my computer’s VRAM is way lower than it should be.

Ultimately, I was very disappointed, though. I had trouble rigging it, and just got frustrated and finished it so I could be finished.

It just looks bad, sigh. I couldn’t control the linework well, and after baking the normals to textures, they had some artifacts. The face doesn’t look good now – maybe in part because of the colours – and it’s stiff as fuck. And because it was Cycles, it was difficult to see these things before rendering. Plus, some of them probably would’ve gone away if I’d used more samples, but it would take hours to render. I need to investigate more and find a solution.

Lightning Boy Studio released their shader for Eevee. It’s quite good.

I don’t intend to buy it, though. I can already do pretty much everything it can. But, what catches my eye is how it can isolate different lights. I’d known for a while it’s possible using drivers, but I don’t like to use them because it means you have to either keep one light with one character no matter what you do, or go to the hassle or resetting it every time. But, being able to do that in real time would be very convenient. The trouble is, Eevee still has no way to give me the outlines I need. I don’t really want to drop that feature, because it’s important for getting an uneven edge and making things look less 3d without compromising the linework with actual displacement. But, it’s worth looking into. I want to isolate lights, but in a way that minimises the work I have to do. One or two clicks would be best. Although, my shader in general seems to choke Eevee, so even if I could do that I’m not sure how much good it would do.

All in all, I’m frustrated, but I still have goals. I want to make another model. And then another one. And another one after that. Each time, I can learn. I can make the next one better. I want to make the next one better. I don’t want to be bogged down hating myself and what I’ve made anymore. I’m not really one for new year’s resolutions, but I do want to make a lot of art this year.

I’ll make another model of Serph when I’m a bit better. A better one. But not now. Not scrapping this one to do it.

Introversion

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.

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.

Thief King’s Progress

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.

Maya and Progress

I’ve spent quite a bit of time recently trying to get used to ZBrushCore and adapt to the way it works. I’ve become quite annoyed at myself; there are several things I didn’t know about it that would have been very useful if I’d known about them sooner. Like Dynamesh being able to preserve edges, or not, according to a slider. 3DCoat could make even topology using voxels, but was limited to the voxel grid, so it couldn’t preserve them. Having that feature has made it easier in ZBrushCore to do that. So I’ve been spending more time recently working in it and trying to adapt. I should have used it sooner, sigh. Although, from what I remember it was more expensive before, and didn’t have Sculptris Pro, its dynamic topology sculpting, when I looked before, but still.

In any case, I’ve been using it a lot. I’ve become quite accustomed to the controls now…I’m starting to see what proficient ZBrush users mean when they claim that it’s actually fine once you get used to it. When I went back into 3DCoat for some retopology, I had difficult navigating because I’d got used to way to do it in ZBrushCore.

So far, as far as workable model parts go, I’ve made a male and female base mesh. I made the male one for starters, mainly for practice. I want to make lots of character models…I’d rather they be bespoke, but sadly that’s just not practical. So, the next best thing is to make a base mesh to save time, then add unique heads and modify them into distinct models. That saves time, making it more workable, and is efficient.

I made the male one first, then retooled it into a female mesh. I was planning to make the female base mesh from scratch, but I really wanted to just have something. Looking at them now, the abs have kind of melted on the male one. I haven’t got the hang of smoothing just yet, entirely; I end up being a bit too aggressive with it. I want to make some proper models from these….Malik, Mariku, Ryou, Bakura, and lots of others. I didn’t give breasts to the female mesh; since those vary from woman to woman, it didn’t make sense to add them there. I don’t want to be one of those artists that gives all their female character models the same chest, or the same body type in general, at that.

I made hands and feet beforehand to practice and attach to the models. I didn’t get them quite right, though; the palm of the hand is bad, and the toes aren’t quite right. I sculpted them a bit differently to the way I saw in tutorials I got; I wanted them to be separate pieces, just in case that was ever a focus. It’s unlikely, since I don’t do anything focusing on feet, but I want the option.

Unfortunately, having put the effort in one details like the fingernails and toenails, they were erased by having to dynamesh them together onto the model. It seems ZBrushCore doesn’t have proper booleans. I have to resculpt them after. I also didn’t get them quite right, the way the feet are on the models. Legs in general, I’m very weak at.

I started making a model of Maya from Persona 2, to see if I could get a decent character model. I found that even ZBrushCore was slow if I subdivided the whole model high enough to get high details on the face like sharp creases, but I could mask an area and subdivide that, and, unlike 3DCoat, it was still smoothable within that area because they were quads. Although, it meant any smoothing at the edge of the subdivided area was problematic. I could sort of correct it with the decimation smoothing of Sculptris Pro, but not so well. Next time, I’ll have to leave the sharp details for very last and not get ahead of myself.

I think I managed to make a decent face. I still haven’t worked out mouth interiors, though, and the ears were terrible so I drastically simplified them. Right now, I’m relatively happy with the overall state of it, at least. I think I’ve confirmed that sculpting that way can get reasonable results, as far as mesh quality is concerned.

I retopologised it in 3DCoat, but didn’t end up baking there; the 2048×2048 limit is too low, and upgrading to the pro version is too expensive. I baked the normals from the high poly in Blender at 4096*4096, with one UV map for the whole body, for the sake of speed. It seems to give decent results, though for long term stuff, I should make proper UVs; I went with a mangled automatic one for testing.

I also, while I was there, tried a Fake SSGI shader I came across, by 0451 on the Blender Artists forum. It’s clever; it gives more realistic looking results, and responds to lights better than a standard Principled Shader does. I’m planning to experiment on my pseudowatercolour shader and see if I can apply any of this into it. I’m not satisfied with how responsive it is, especially due to the use of colour ramps. I know of a way I might be able to make it respond to colour, too, which I need to experiment with.

Using a very simple version on the normal mapped, low poly model, it seems to soften the shadows a bit, when using a sun lamp and a point lamp, whereas the standard diffuse doesn’t really do anything. I’m sure someone more savvy regarding lighting setups could highlight it better, but what matters is, it’s useful. I’ll experiment with it.

It was inconvenient getting the model this far, though. I’d rather have baked it in 3DCoat, but other than the inconvenient texture size limit, and shoddy implementation of UDIMs I’d have to work around, it triangulated the model on import, which messed it up a bit, so I had to avoid it by baking in Blender, which is quite an inconvenient program to bake in. I need to find a more elegant solution.

Still, I feel I’ve made progress. There are anatomical errors with these models, no doubt, but I feel like I can fix it technically. That I’m not being held down by some stupid problem in the software. That’s refreshing.

As for personally, it’s been a mixed bag recently. I haven’t been feeling very good, and had a relapse of self-harm. I haven’t been sleeping well, either….I couldn’t sleep for most of the night the other day, feeling horrible, and when I have been sleeping, it’s mostly been nightmares. Perhaps it’s my brain’s way of telling me to wake up and make myself useful, haha. I get hunted a lot in my sleep. I often die. The other night, I dreamt me and some others were running away from a monster. We got to an arena, with a sign claiming the only way to stop the monster was for two people to fight in the arena and one to kill the other. I didn’t have the heart to kill my opponent, and woke up muttering a volunteer for death, not for the first time.

My sister has been more aggressive recently, too. We’ve been arguing more. The other night I got told to drink bleach because I yelled at her for yelling about some stupid crap in a video game she was playing. I was quite tempted to swallow some just to spite her.

Things will probably get better. I’m making progress, I think. I need to make more.

On this blog, I’ve mostly written about my NPR work so far. But the other reason I started it was to write about how things are going for me in general, too. It’s good to vent about things, or just process, so that’s what this post is for.

I’ve been quite annoyed at work recently. I work in a shop. Obviously, with the coronavirus pandemic, that’s made it more stressful than usual. During March and April, we probably had double or more our usual amount of customers coming in. That wouldn’t be so bad by itself, but since this lockdown, I’ve noticed more….Inconsiderate people. People who think the rules don’t apply to them, like signs saying not to enter and aisle because we’re working it – especially the bloody alcohol section – quite a few customers have blatantly ignored.

I get very frustrated with people like that; it’s like they think they and their…Petty wants are the only things that matter. They aren’t even buying anything important. I could understand at least, if they were bypassing the no entry barrier to get some toilet roll or basic food, but it’s not. It’s always the ones after their alcohol that think they’re more important. It’s making me quite cynical, unfortunately, as if I wasn’t enough already; I’ve really come to think that most people who live near the shop I work in are just alcoholics, and/or gambling addicts. Hell, according to the rumour mill, even one of the supervisors is an alcoholic.

Despite the pandemic, the lockdown, people have continued to come in several times a day to get their fix, buying multiple bottles of booze, or cans, or sets of scratchcards, cigarettes….Those people really make me dislike my job. I don’t want to help people continue their addictions. And I just really dislike having to serve people that think they’re more important than everyone else. Because of that, I’ve been developing more of an attitude recently; when a customer got angry at me for telling him to stand behind the line that marks a 2 metre distance, I just said “Whatever”. Not exactly great customer service, but I’ve really exhausted my patience for that kind of person.

We’ve also had a significant increase in threats towards staff members, and general shitty attitudes. I haven’t experienced much of that, though, at least directly to my face. I think it’s because they don’t see as a woman though, sigh; it’s the female members of staff who’ve been getting the most of it. Probably because they’re most likely cowardly men who feel more confident picking on them.

So work has been quite tiring recently because of all that. I have some time off soon, which I’m looking forward to. I hope I can use it well, as well as relax a bit. My colleagues are mostly good, at least; recently, I’ve been getting on well with one who I talk to about films and other media when we’re on shift together. He writes films and wants to work in that industry, so I can relate a lot with discussions about different things we look for in media, thoughts about generically popular stuff, etc.

On another note, I’ve recently been trying ZBrushCore. I got very frustrated with 3DCoat. I’ve been trying really hard, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t get a good enough surface quality. I upgraded my RAM, which helped get better performance, but it couldn’t let me get high enough to use voxel meshes at a high enough resolution to hide the jaggedness, so they’d never stand up to a close up. I realised, when it came down to it, the problem was the mesh type. It uses triangles, which are very hard to get a smooth surface with, and don’t crease well. So I thought I’d try Core; last time I checked it, it didn’t have Sculptris Pro, its version of dynamic topology, so I didn’t get it. I find ZBrush’s dynamesh-focused way of making a mesh very awkward…It feels unnatural to me to have to do the whole model at one fixed resolution, limiting how much you can detail it, having to do it all at once. I find it much more natural and convenient to just do what I want to whatever detail, without having to worry about resolution while I’m sculpting. Obviously, the final mesh needs to be even, but it’s so awkward having to think about topology while sculpting. It’s said to be easier because it forces you to focus on forms, primary, secondary, tertiary details in order, but I just can’t seem to get the hang of it.

Core is a lot cheaper than full ZBrush, which is sitting at like £900, basically. I’m quite enjoying it so far; it’s a lot easier to get a good, smooth mesh, though I’m having difficulty adapting my sculpting style. I’m used to using a flatten tool that levels area to block out a lot of shape, like slapping on a bit of clay and scraping off the excess to make a plane. Core doesn’t have that kind of brush, though it does have a somewhat similar brush, except it doesn’t level it.

I’ve been doing some sketching. Recently, I’ve been trying a more traditional style of sketching; just sculpting everything without thinking of it as something that needs to be ready to use on a retopologised model, like sculpting the eyes onto the mesh rather than giving it hollow eye sockets with separate eye objects.

They’re very bad, but to be fair, they’re sketches and I’ve been trying to get used to a new program. I found the navigation very difficult at first; I wasn’t used to the way ZBrush does it at all. Looking at them all now, though, I really need to vary my faces up. They all have the same cheekbone shape, and the way it makes that sort of 7 shape from the corner of the eye to the chin. And reference more, of course. The ears are only good on these because they’re a ZBrush asset, haha.

I’ve still got to totally get to grips with it, but I am finding it a bit easier now. When I have the money, I think I’ll buy it. I feel like I can make the mesh quality I need with this, since it generates quad meshes instead of forcing triangles on me. Although, I’ll still use 3DCoat for retopology, UVs, texture painting and normal mapping, since it’s good at those and Core has no such functionality.

Anyway, I’m trying to improve and get back on track with my sculpting. I want to get better and make more, and my watercolour shader is just waiting to be used.

I think I should make more posts like this, though. It’s good to just ramble about things sometimes, and talk about WIPs without feeling like I have to talk about some milestone.

Untitled

I always mean to post here more. I don’t really get round to it enough, though. I’ve currently got it named Riya’s NPR Log, but I do mean for this blog to be more than just about that. It’s good to talk about how things are going, thoughts on things, etc. Nobody is listening, but it is good to write it out.

I’ve been very frustrated recently. With my sculpting, and art capability in general. I actually started getting back into 3D several years ago, after I met Millie. Her art is very cute. It inspired me to want to make some myself, but I can’t draw. 3D is all I’m good for, and even that is marginal. I hate myself. After all that time, what I can show for myself is…Very little. I always felt inferior. Looking around at what everyone else was making, they were…Vastly superior to me. My best was utterly insufficient next to their “sketches”. It still is. I’ve been working hard all this time to improve, and I have made progress…But I want to be better than this. I always feel “It’s not good enough yet“. It’s such a frustrating feeling….That, always, always, if I could get that one more thing, I would be satisfied. That the flood gates would open and I’d be able to do so much. But it never comes. The goalposts are always moving. Shaders/art style, mesh quality, anatomical accuracy, efficiency…I wonder why I hold them over my head so much. But somehow, I got into the habit, and it’s difficult to stop.

Everything I make, I feel crippled on. All I can seem to see is what’s wrong with it. I want to finish more things, but I can’t stop thinking about the myriad ways in which they’re lacking. That they don’t do justice to what I was trying to depict, or aren’t good enough to be seen. I really wonder how to fix this. I’ve been trying hard to improve my skills, but every time I improve, I end up feeling like what I did before wasn’t good enough, and thinking of a higher bar for what’s “acceptable”. There’s no such thing as “good enough”, or “good”; just things I can stand, for a little while, to call done. And then never want to see again because I’ll see all the errors and inadequacies.

I really don’t know how to fix myself. I wonder when I became such a perfectionist. I feel like a letdown. But I’m tired. I’m sick of being that one thing away from being good enough.

I really like to sculpt. I enjoy it. Anatomy is interesting. There’s a lot of diversity in people’s appearances. I like to learn about different NPR techniques and try applying them to the styles I want to create and replicate. There are lots of things I want to sculpt and render. But I really wish I could feel like anything I made was right, good enough or decent.