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.

Sketches And Clothes

I’ve been doing a lot of sketching recently. Until recently, when I’ve been making models, they’ve been focused at making something ready to retopologise and rig, something I could put my shaders on to render. It’s difficult, and time-consuming…Having to thing about whether it’ll hold up from multiple angles, different zooms, if the retopology is sufficient for the posing it’ll need…It’s hard.

Yan suggested I should sketch more, and when I tried, it was quite fun. It’s a lot less stressful, I’ve found, when I sketch. Not having to worry about topology or think too hard on rendering. If I want an eye, I can just carve one in. Not have to make a particular cavity for an eyeball because it’ll need to be able to rotate by itself when it’s retopologised. It only needs as much detail as a sketch needs…Not realistic, refined details. It’s….A lot more fun and relaxing. I’ve found myself getting into it a lot more.

I’ve been sculpting a lot of heads recently. I really want to get better at them. The image on the top left is how they tend to look before I dynamesh them to smooth them out. I like to carve them out more than add volume; it feels more natural to me, and it makes it easy to make the planes. Then when they’re firmly established, it’s easier to keep the shape when smoothing it out. I was quite pleased with the top left one, for a sketch.

I’m also trying to sculpt different kinds of faces….More realistic, more stylised, boney, soft. I don’t want to be only capable of sculpting one type of face. Or end up as one of those annoying CGI character artists that can only seem to sculpt scantily-clad women.

The male character there is a TKB model I’ve been working on. The face below that image is his. It’s difficult….For practice’s sake, I’ve focused on trying to learn realistic anatomy. But the Yugioh manga is very stylised, and they have very sharp faces. I couldn’t see Bakura, or any of them, with a very realistic appearance, like a wide chin or such. Takahashi’s style favoured sharp corners. So I tried to adapt that to a more realistic style, to make a semi-realistic type, keeping the sharp chin and nose, but not departing totally from reality. I’m not sure if I succeeded or not…But it’s a work in progress.

I feel fairly satisfied with his body, at least. It’s definitely not perfect, but it is better than previous ones I’d done. I took a bit of a different approach to sculpting the legs, which seemed to work out. The lower legs look better than previous efforts…Though the upper half isn’t great. I should also tweak the arms a bit…They don’t seem quite right. Too angular.

I also decided to practice making clothes. I’ve hit a wall here, unfortunately. ZBrushCore doesn’t seem to have good tools when it comes to making clothes with any complexity.

I tried making a jacket. This is an important test case because the flaps are a bit complicated. They fold over, but don’t connect, to the main jacket. Core doesn’t have any modeling tools, so I made it by masking and extracting. But when I tried to merge them, the image on the right happened. The dynamesh fuses it onto the jacket, and, I think because it’s narrow rather than thick, creates holes. It’s very frustrating….I realised working on that Maya model, it would be better to be able to just sculpt the clothes. Then I don’t have to mess about with topology until I have to retopologise it, and case relatively easily add things like zips, seams and buttons. But if it can’t handle something as simple as a flap, it’ll most likely choke on anything reasonable. And I really don’t want to have to model it and then waste hard drive space exporting it into ZBrushCore and then time having to align it properly. I tried using 3DCoat’s retopology tools to make a basic clothing mesh and then sculpt it there, but it can’t handle backfaces and lacks convenient tools to model anything that isn’t directly on the mesh, so I couldn’t really get it to work. They’d advertised their new cloth simulator and the support they’d put in the retopo room for making clothes, but it’s not really convenient for anything elaborate….Seems to be a running issue with 3DCoat.

So I’m very frustrated because of that. Character models aren’t good without clothes. I need to get better and able to make those. Especially given that some of them are very character-important, like TKB’s jacket in our version of citron. I have to find a solution.

2020

So, I’m slightly late, but I decided to make a post about last year, and what I want from this year.

2019 was a bit of a positive year for me. It was difficult, personally, with some things that have been going on in real life, but I think for my art it was a bit better. I have a terrible perfectionism problem. Even with fics. But I was able to make a little bit of progress on it last year. I started writing True Sound, and did several chapters of An Unconventional Union already with Yan. I also wrote several more chapters than are currently released.

But, if you look at the amount of posts I’ve made here, and on my Tumblr…It’s not many. I experimented more, prototyped…But I didn’t do nearly enough finished works. I was still so bogged down trying to make it “good enough” and being bothered by how 3d it looked. Because of that, I didn’t finish much, even though I wanted to. I’m frustrated with myself for that. I want to do more. I want to be better and show my art and ideas, too. I tried last year to beat that stupid perfectionism, and I progressed, but it’s still there.

This year, I want to kill it. To make a lot more, and post a lot more, without worrying so much if it’s not perfect, or how NPR or 2d-looking it is. Those are my goals, but if I spend so much time trying to get one perfect thing, what will I have to show for myself? One thing.

Another thing I want to work on is my energy. I find for some reason, I’m frequently low on energy. It makes it difficult to do anything, and with the internet and such in easy reach, it’s too easy to end up vegging out for hours. Part of it is because I’m off my antidepressants, I’m sure. But I need to knuckle down and make myself focus, and, again, push that perfectionism aside. I have fics I want to write, and art to make. It won’t do itself. Though I’m told I should also take more breaks, too, rather than being constantly in a mindset of thinking I’m meant to be working. I find it difficult to relax these days. I hate it. I can’t seem to switch off, but being switched on doesn’t mean I’m in the right mindset or have enough energy. It’s like being awake enough that you’re not asleep, but too tired to move.

Still, I am trying. To prove that, I have some work in progress images to show. I started a Ryou model the other day. After spending a few hours, I was able to make his face and upper body. He also has a lower body, but, as per usual, it’s trash. I’m very, very poor at legs and waists. I invested in some videos about sculpting and anatomy that I need to watch to learn more, and get more references.

It’s extremely rough at the moment. I started out sculpting him a bit aimlessly. I’m not sure exactly what I’m doing with his face. I know that I want faces on my Yugioh art to be stylised in some way, but I’m not quite sure how, so I’m just trying to go with what I like.

Now that I look at it, the side is very squished. That’s not right at all.

I think the look I’m going for is sort of psuedo anime? Slightly stylised proportions and shape, but keeping some realistic elements, like realistic anatomy and proportions, and features like noses, rather than more common anime kinds like noses stylised to points, or, on very stylised or chibi characters, that sort of snout-shaped face.

Looking at Yugi’s hair as an example, I don’t think Yugioh characters would adapt to a totally realistic style very well. If he was rendered in complete realism, his hair would destroy it by looking unnatural as hell. It just isn’t how realistic hair looks or works, especially elements like the red edges to it; that could, maybe, be styled as his hair becoming redder at the ends or something, but that wouldn’t hold up from multiple angles. So, I think a semi-realistic style at most is best for him and the other Yugioh characters I want to make models of.

My other problem is that Ryou is very slim. I’m used to doing more muscular characters to learn anatomy, so I’ve made him far too fit just by default. I need to slim him right down until he looks suitably bishonen, haha. But truly, this model is, in its current state, embarrassingly bad. I didn’t reference a lot so far, partly because I couldn’t be bothered and partly because I was in the zone when I was doing it and didn’t want to kill my momentum. So it has lots of problems, like the terrible waist that has no hips, the weird shape from the side, the back being altogether horrible, the lack of ribs and serratus, which I basically flattened to oblivion because they were horrible…He’s too broad, to boot, and too narrow from the side.

I wanted to just power through it before I lost momentum by stressing about those, but I really should correct them before sculpting more on him. If he’s missing landmarks and correct muscle placement, it won’t look better when it’s slim and smoothed; it’ll only be blobby.

It’s really horrible to me, so far. Some work can fix it, and I’m going to try that. Yan encouraged me to show more wips and all, so I’m trying that. I want to show more of them as the year progresses, too. I’d like to get more skilled and able to finish them better and more quickly, though.

Still, this is something, at least. And when I put it through 3DCoat’s basic renderer, it doesn’t look entirely terrible with shading. There’s a lot to fix, but it exists, at least. And this as it stands, even when corrected, should be a far cry from how he’ll look with my shaders and NPR techniques.

So, I think I am making progress. Baby steps, maybe, but still, progress. I want to post more this year, so hopefully I’ll post some updates soon as I progress on him. I want to make a Ryou basemesh to derive our au-versions from, and do the same for other characters as well.

For now, I’ll just try and work on it when I have time, and try to push those negative thoughts out of my mind.

More 3DCoat Tests

I’ve been using 3DCoat quite a bit since I started testing it. I don’t think I can comfortably go back to using Blender’s sculpting much having used it; it just lacks a lot of the features 3DCoat has by default, or, it has them, but they’re awkward to set up, and, at least on my device, the performance is far better in 3DCoat than the equivalent polycount in Blender, and its painting and retopology tools are very convenient.

But, I’m still not entirely solid on how I should be using it. What level of detail to use, how I should block out limbs. The voxel sculpting is convenient for making a base mesh shape by putting together some primitives, but I don’t like that method. It doesn’t feel good for me, and I find it awkward, especially in the absence or convenient transform hotkeys like Blender, where I just have to press one button and move my mouse. Or it could have those, and I just haven’t discovered them yet. I wonder what the best resolutions are to work at when doing various things, such as blocking out, starting to get more detailed, etc. I’d prefer to be able to sculpt without thinking about that, but if I went to a high resolution straight away, I’d end up with something lumpy. Although, that also depends on the brush size.

For starters, I’ve been doing more faces.

I’m not very good at faces. That was one I did a few weeks ago, and it’s quite poor. I didn’t reference, since I was just doing it for practice with the software, mostly, but it’s still bad. It also looks too much like the same face I do if I do a head without thinking about it. I’ve been wanting to gain variety, so I tried doing different heads, too.

I quite liked how that one came out. I like wider noses like that better than sharp and narrow ones. I still need to tackle eyes more, though. They’re something I’m awful at. I should practice more on those, too. I think my current experiments with different detail levels won’t apply to eyes, though, since they’re likely to be detailed just by being the way they are.

I also experimented with some torsos. I didn’t reference, so they’re also flawed, but the main point was learning what works better. This first one, I tried a resolution of 2.00, but using smaller strokes. It was a bad one, I think; I found it became lumpy easily even after smoothing, and didn’t really benefit from it. It was slightly clearer crap.

The next one, I tried a similar level of detail, but using broader brushes. I haven’t tried smoothing this out yet, but I feel better about it; I was able to build up the general shapes more easily, while still being fairly clear. I used the General Clay brush to just build this up and carve bits out, unlike my usual method that uses the General Clay brush to make the general shape, then the Flatten brush to make it into the shape I want.

I still have a few days left on my 3DCoat trial that I want to make the most of. And apply this to proper models.

Testing 3DCoat

Recently, I’ve been playing with the trial version of 3DCoat. A problem I’ve been having with Blender that’s been frustrating me is the sculpting performance. When watching timelapses of other people sculpting, I noticed that often, even with single bits like an arm or a leg, they could easily go into hundreds of thousands of faces and above, especially when smoothing, adding creases, etc. In Blender, I can only get to about 100,000 triangles before it starts to slow down slightly, particularly when trying to undo. At a minimum, with the detail level I use, I need around 200,000 – 300,000 for a full body, but the performance really starts to become slow and problematic. It’s just totally insufficient for me. I don’t tend to make extremely high detail meshes, but I’d like the option, and better performance in general, so I started looking at other digital sculpting programs. I’m ignoring ZBrush; though it’s considered the industry standard as I understand it when it comes to digital sculpting, I’m a hobbyist, and don’t need industry standard….And I certainly don’t need industry standard price. There’s no way I can afford it.

I looked at Mudbox first, as it’s immediately the cheapest one that I know of. It’s about £12 a month, last time I checked, which seems to be the most affordable, at least per payment. But, when I tried out its recently added dynamic tesselation, it wasn’t very covnenient or intuitive, and didn’t give me all the options I’d like, and the options it did have weren’t very well explained, though the performance seemed to be alright. But it also didn’t give me as many hotkeys to change as I wanted, which I hate, as I’m really used to using hotkeys for almost everything in Blender. I also had to pay for one month’s subscription to get full access; the demo version didn’t include the dynamic tesselation, which was the thing I was really interested in as I hate to have to make a base mesh first. I suspect it was deliberate, to extract more money from people.

What I’ve been trying now is 3DCoat, which I’m liking. The workflow is different than I’m used to, but I can see the logic in it, and it gives me many more hotkeys to setup. I was easily able to replace most of the default ones with what I’m used to, and, with a bit of practice, familiarise myself with the different ways some of the brushes, such as the Snake Hook work than what I’m used to, and which ones may be the best options to replace the brushes and settings I’m used to using. I’m enjoying it so far, and the performance, as expected, blows Blender out of the water. I’ve found it fairly easy to get used to, though some things don’t work as I’d expect them to.

So, I did a few test head sculpts to practice and familiarise myself with it and work out how I should work in it. I didn’t reference with these; it was more like doodling than any serious attempt to make something. I need to study more faces and gain variety, though. Especially people from various ethnic origins and ages.

I’m going to spend more time practicing with 3DCoat and see what else I can do with it. But I have a good feeling about it. And I definitely can’t go back to Blender’s sculpting the same way after this. I may well end up buying it.