February ProgBlog #1: pingpong

On Tuesday I posted this screenie of Zara in showoff pose on ko-fi

and that's where I'm still currently stuck while the next few moves work themselves out in my head.

It was a good excuse to jump back to Red and redo the retopo. My edge loops are probably not the best right now but they were a lot worse on my original retopo, no wonder I was having so much trouble with deformations. Not to mention it was probably a lot heavier than it should have been. Having said that it was kind of an experiment in seeing if I could get high poly to work and I'm not smart enough so I'll stick with mid poly and subdivision surfaces. And fix all the edge loops while I'm about it because there was no coming back from that one.

And of course seeing as I was doing the retopo and also had to redo the normal map I figured I may as well just fix the sculpt properly so I can bake it (I don't think I baked the sculpt properly for Red and just painted the normal map as the sculpt was unaffected by the mess the bake shells make). He's supposed to pretty toned but more on the slender side, and I'd erred on the side of making him a bit too skinny like a teenager (he's currently early 30s) so I started fixing that, and fixing the mesh on the way as it kept breaking/tearing in parts.

I'm not sure why he was blue, I must have been experimenting with something or other at some stage. The sculpt models are meant to be that kind of clayey colour. Anyway in reworking the mesh I accidentally gave him vitiligo. I did start on the wing fingers as they all needed thickening (especially the inner two) and ended up jumping onto his body and thickening things up a little there, I haven't moved down to his legs yet.

And because I really love finding major problems when it's really hard to fix (seriously why didn't I notice this much, much earlier in the base model I ask you), I realised when I spun him round to work on back muscles that a) the tail is way too bloody high up like seriously what in the actual hell was wrong with me that I missed something so blatant forever) and b) with how ridiculously long Dragonkin tails are the base connection was so thin it would probably snap off.

So that was another thing to fix.

This should work better. I'll have to remember to adjust the base model and the tail rig when I get around to fixing them up (which will be much easier in Blender). Don't mind the kinks in the tail, that happened when I moved it down (with a giant move brush which was...entertaining). I'm since moving along making it thicker and really not looking forward to hitting this bit

where I honestly for the life of me do not have a clue what happened there to break it so badly.

I also finally figured the build clay brush seems to be smoother than live or general clay so have been using that when drawing/sculpting alongside close hole and clean clay (which is currently on reconstruct as that gets rid of the weird areas without changing the outline too much).

This is probably going to take me a while (but hopefully not as long as starting from scratch). At least a lot of the retopo is done in my head so hopefully that will translate relatively quickly.

This post also appears on my blog.

Teenagers are worse than toddlers for not going to bed when you tell them to.

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Thanks for looking! ^_

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