Not much particularly done the past week (I've got potential work opportunity lined up, and it occupied for mind for a while!), but I've got some things lined up that I want to share!

The first thing is an introduction art piece that I'm planning on doing for my model!

Before I make any big animations with my persona in it, I would like to make a small little animation that showcases the model, and gives more backstory on the general setting that I would like to make. This would also include a little bit of backstory of the character themselves in universe. I reckon I will eventually make a little character sheet for Navi and the Star Slipper as well, but that's later down the line when I get back to those models. To make the render look how I want it to, I've been making the steady process of figuring out how to use Arnold for Maya. It doesn't seem to be too complicated, but it's still something to learn. As a tangent, during my college course we used a renderer called Renderman. It's created by Pixar and people can make great stuff with it. We, however, were students with absolutely no experience with the renderer. This could only lead to very good things happening. I have a complete and utter disdain for Renderman because of all the problems that I had with it. There were so many situations where I couldn't figure out why something didn't look how I wanted it to or just not working flat out. One of the things that I absolutely HATE is when a renderer doesn't have a live preview. Renderman kind of has one, but it was basically just a low resolution render of the finished product. It annoys be not being able to see my materials because I can't tell at a glance if something is wrong. Arnold at least tries to give a preview of the materials (not very well, but whatever...), so it's really annoying to see that Renderman doesn't at least show the albedo of a material. There could have been some sort of setting or checkbox that I didn't see when I used it, but it was annoying. Also, when I tried it at home, it made me install a virtual licensing program directly to my boot drive. In fact, it outright didn't work when I tried to place it on my other drive. Licensing software infuriates me to no end. I won't say anything absolute, but I tend to keep my eye-patch and tricorn hat handy when I use 3D programs.

Rant over!

One of the problems that I've stumbled across when trying to animate is that the laptop that I'm working on is very much not capable of using Maya for animation. It can differ between rigs, but the performance is relatively low. Maya's cached playback . This is understandable, as it's my brother's old one from when he went to Uni (about 4 or 5 years ago..). It might be a little silly, but this could very well have some sort of subconscious effect on my drive to animate. If your tools didn't work well, would you want to do the thing you love with those tools? I'm planning on trying to download Maya again on my desktop PC, though I really rather I wouldn't. I try to keep my gaming stuff and my 3D stuff separate. One of the ways I can do this is when I go to the library on Tuesdays, since it gives me a specific time frame to focus only on 3D. But if I can't do it on my laptop then I have to use my PC. But I can't bring my PC with me, so I need to bring the laptop. It's an annoying cycle that I can hopefully mitigate when I get a new laptop. When that will be, though, I'm, not too sure.

For the time being, I've also decided that I will use both the Mixamo rig and Arise rig (once the Arise one has good skinning.....). I figured that instead of trying to get a single rig that does everything that I want, I make a compromise and have a subdued rig (the Mixamo one) for less intensive scenes and a rig with more cartoon controls and exaggeration built in (the Arise rig). While this still means I need to do the Arise skinning, it at least lets me have some sort of rig available for the time being. It also allows me to setup for my:

Potential video essay series!

It's a very impromptu thing, but I reckon it would be really fun to at least try it out. I do have some ideas on what I want to talk about, but I would have to do some more research and take my own notes. I also had an interesting dilemma on my hands. I didn't actually know if people did video essays on Newgrounds. I figured it might've been the case, but the first thing that comes to my mind as a really early video essay was Arin Hanson's Sequelitis and that was released on Youtube. Luckily, there was a lot of helpful people on the NG forums that answered my question! A big thanks to all those people who gave me some info and suggested series that are similar to what I want to do! One of the main things that I was worried about was Newgrounds' policy on copyrighted content, but there's plenty of people that use copyrighted works on here in a transformative and artistic way. Two of the main inspirations that I want to use are Noodle and Doodley. Noodle for his style of humour and presentation (that being an animated character with segments of narration over footage) and Doodley for editing style and generally just for being in 3D as well. To preface the series, I plan on doing a teaser trailer, which will be my next project after I'm done with my introduction piece.

That's it for this week's post! Not much to show at the current moment, but it's a good glimpse into what I'm planning in the near to somewhat further off future!

Thank you and good-bye for today!

Did some sculpting this week! I did say that I would try to do some animation, but that didn't turn out for reasons you will come to understand. It's also just very tricky for me to get the ball rolling on animation. Everything else I can start just fine, but not animation. I'll definitely try to get some done the coming week instead.

For sculpting, I just did a little bit doodling (that's the only way I can accurate describe it), I took a little break from trying to learn anatomy to just goof about and play around with the tools that Zbrush offers.

That being said....

I accidentally made a Funko Pop.....

I didn't set out to make this, it just kind of happened as I was playing around. It doesn't look necessarily bad, just not what I expected it to come out as when I was making it. However, it certainly looks better than what I would have done not too long ago. Even though it's still stylised I could still feel myself considering head anatomy when making it. That's a pretty good sign that I'm absorbing the information about anatomy that I've found.

In terms of other things that I did this week, I've also been really hip-hoppy around wanting to use the Mixamo rig that I got and using Arise for the rig.

While Mixamo is really good for making a rig very quickly, but it doesn't have the versatility that I would like out of a rig. It doesn't have any squash and stretch controls and doesn't really let you add those things in any way (from what I can tell). That's understandable, Mixamo is more for motion capture and realistic characters, which my model most certainly isn't. On the other hand, Arise has a lot more really good cartoon controls that I'm looking for. However, it's skinning algorithm is absolutely HORRENDOUS. With Mixamo, I could just do a few tiny alterations and slap a delta mush on to get the weighting look good. With Arise, I basically have to completely rebuild the skinning from scratch. It could just be a couple of settings that I need to fiddle around with, but it's just so tedious. What makes this worse is that I can't even transfer the skinning from the Mixamo rig to the Arise one because of how different the structure is. Mixamo just has what you would expect: A rig with probably 2 or 3 more to drive the IK and FK of the binding skeleton. Arise has a whole bunch of twist joints on the arms, different joints for rotation and sections of the body. I appreciate that Arise is able to do all of this just from a preset that it's got, but the skinning is a real deal breaker for me. I've got a real bad case of Stockholm Syndrome with Arise. I keep thinking: "Surely I'll be able to fix the skinning this time. Surely this time." and then have a real bad time trying to do it.

As I said at the start of this post, I'm going to try and do more animation this week. I might try and find a different set of videos on Youtube to follow along with. The ones I'm following along with are good, but they're kinda short, and don't go into too much detail. I've also gotten my hands on a course for doing anatomy specifically in Zbrush, so I might be able to fast track the process! I'll just have to wait and see.

Thank you and good-bye for today!

This week, I worked on some more rigging for my model! However, the phrase "I worked on some rigging" is a bit a bit of an overstatement, which I will talk about in the post. However, the broad strokes of the rig are more or less finished! I still need to add some extra features that I want to have, fix up some weights and overall refine the rig but the controls and main FKIK skeletons are done!

I decided to forgo the use of Arise because I was having issues with how some of the controls worked. I still might go back to it if I can iron out the kinks. For the time being, though, I've decided to opt to use Mixamo for the rigging as per the suggestion of a good friend. However, this would also come with it's own set of problems. The first one was rather simple to fix. Mixamo isn't a big fan of having floating geometry, which my model is almost entirely comprised of. So I just simply needed to add some proxy geometry to allow the algorithm to do it's thing. The other issue was something that was much more difficult to try and fix. Once upon a time, Mixamo had a script that would create controls for any of the models put through their system. They have since stopped sharing this script (for reasons that will be explained), but there has since been a reupload of it on a user's gumroad account.

This is all well and good, except for the fact that Maya would not run the script. After a little bit of searching I found that it was because the version of Maya that I had didn't come pre-installed with Python 2. I figured that this would be an easy fix. However, I had found out that Maya hasn't supported Python 2 since 2023. This was obviously a problem, as the script relied on something that was no longer supported. After many a headache, I found out that I could use a command that ran something that would convert Python 2 scripts to Python 3. In a tremendous stroke of bad luck, it also turned out that Maya in-built Python interpreter had since removed that function. I was practically pulling out my hair at this point since I'm not particularly well versed in coding. I decided that I would just download Python to run the command myself. I then discovered that even Python itself had since removed the command. Because of this, I had to dig through their older versions and find one that still had support for it (which wasn't an installer, I had to use PowerShell to install it). After many hours spent trying to find a way to convert this script, I had finally found how to do it. I did so, and it worked perfectly. I was so ecstatic and relieved when it generated controls for the skeleton.

I did try out Maya's HumanIK system, but it was much too limited for my liking. I can certainly see it's use for situations where I need to quickly rig a background character or something. However, other than that, I can't particularly see myself using it in the near future.

In short, I used Mixamo to rig my character, then jumped through several hoops to use a script to give it controls in Maya.

I'm hoping to get some animation and sculpting done in the coming week, so get excited for that! I'm more than happy to get into more creative 3D endeavours in the coming week after the technical headache that was getting that script to work properly.

Thank you and good-bye for today!

As stated in the title, I will be crossposting all of my news posts from Newgrounds onto my LinkedIn page. This post will be used as a welcoming page for the first post on LinkedIn. If anybody coming from there is reading this, hello! I usually post works in progresses here in these blog posts, but check the art tab every now and then. There might be something cool!

This isn't really an announcement for people who have found my account from Newgrounds, as I won't be posting a link over to that site here. This is simply a post stating what my plans are. This obviously won't mean that I won't change any of my posting habits on here, it just means that I'll be posting something extra on another site.

In other news, no more sick, so more 3D! I'll do my best to catch up on lost time through my posts here! I've also started up progress again on my persona rig again. A good friend of mine suggested that I use Mixamo to rig my characters. I was a bit sceptical as first, since I didn't have a good impression of the site. But after using it, it seems to place bones and paint weights really well for an automatic tool! The only caveat is that I have to put some dummy geometry connecting the limbs together for it to work, but that's barely a problem. The next step is to find out how to get some nice controls on the bones. I've found an old script from before Mixamo got bought by Adobe that might work, but I haven't tested it yet and I need to download Python 2 for Maya to use. From what I could tell from the instruction guide, the script is fairly straightforward and won't need much fiddling around with.

That's all for this post! I hope to show some progress on stuff in the next post, and I welcome anyone who decides to check out this account via my LinkedIn!

Thank you and good-bye for today!

This week was pretty lackluster. Not really much done for 3D things. I did try and do some stylised sculpting, but then I realised that you actually need to learn anatomy before you can start stylising it. I didn't get particularly far in it so I won't show it.

This is going to be the quickest post that I've done! I'm trying to take it easy this week since I got down with a really bad cold/flu/some sort of sickness a few days that was really kicking me while I was down. Probably best not to expect anything from this coming week, then. I'm certainly feeling better than I was 2 days ago, but I don't think I'm going to particularly enjoy doing any work while I'm still sick.

Regardless of this post's minuscule length, I hope you all have a great week!

Thank you and good-bye for today!

Worked on getting some proper anatomy practice in with some sculpting. It isn't particularly good, but it's certainly a start.

Something to note as well is that I won't show the animation that I've done this week.

I'm more or less starting from square one again, but with a bit more guidance. It's another bouncing ball animation, but made by following along with a tutorial. The only problem is that while I really enjoy animating, I find it hard to get properly motivated to actually learn it. Sculpting I can get into, but animating is really difficult. I wouldn't be surprised if it's from my prior experiences with trying to learn to animate. I might in one or two weeks do a big show of animations that I've done, but for the time being I won't

Something that I will show however, is the sculpting that I did!

Like I said, it certainly isn't the best, but it's a lot better than any other attempts I've made to improve my sculpting. This was based off of the notes that I wrote down while watching the anatomy videos, but I think you can tell where I couldn't really get it right. I would partly attribute that to my notes. They are a bit disorganised so it can be a bit tricky to recall what I was talking about when I wrote them down. I might try to follow along with the tutorial, or maybe try and go back and timestamp the notes so I can get a visual reference as well as a written note.

I've also got a little bit of full body practice going, but that's more secondary at the moment. I want to try and make some stylised busts of characters that I've got floating around in my head, so I wan to try and focus more on the face for the time being.

This is sadly another short post, and I reckon the coming week's post might be a bit lackluster as well. It's certainly feeling like a lazy coming week in terms of 3D things. It's certainly not a lazy week for some real life I have to get done. There are some things that I have to take care of that don't relate to any of this.

I'm not particularly sure if I'm being too hard on myself with everything. One the one hand, I really do wan to get better at what I want to do and prepare myself for my post-graduate. But on the other hand it doesn't feel healthy, if you know what I mean. Not really the work amount being unhealthy (considering I try to do 10 hours a week at least), but moreso the headspace that I have with this. I don't think a "I've got to do as much as I possibly can before my course" mindset is really good for me. But again, on the other hand, I don't want to disappoint anybody that I would be taught by in the course. The course could very well be a beginner friendly post-graduate, but it could also be one that tries to build on things that I might not fully have a grasp on yet. I suppose the only thing that I can hope for is that whatever I'm able to do will be enough for not only my course, but for myself.

Regardless, fingers crossed I can get some stuff done the coming week!

Thank you and good-bye for now!

Decided to finally get around to doing some sculpting this week! After watching a video that refreshed me on the controls of Zbrush and a little follow-along on making a cool model (seen below!), I'm confident that I'll be able to make good progress in the program!

Here's the sculpt! I'm very proud with how this turned out in the end! I might get around to refining this, but for the time being it was just a practice to get my bearings in Zbrush again (I've quickly coloured it and am making a art portal post as we speak). I followed along with this Nexttut tutorial, and the man hosting it was very enjoyable to watch! Obviously things weren't perfect, but it's certainly pretty good for a practice sculpt. Even better, this only used around 3 or 4 brushes. I've got plenty of community made brushes which I would love to use in the near future, but the fact that such a small amount of brushes can be used to make something is quite astounding. Wouldn't you agree?

Currently, I'm in the process of jotting down notes for both animating and Zbrush. I'll be sure to intersperse the animation notes with actual practice.

The notes are a bit all over the place, but I'm hoping that I can either sort them out at a later date or interpret them afterwards like some sort of archeologist. The notes that I'm been taking have been from mostly YanSculpts Blender Anatomy course for the sculpting and I Want to be an Animator for the animation notes. I really did try to use Blender to sculpt, but I just genuinely don't enjoy it's UI or its features (luckily anatomy is universal!). I know that it's an incredibly valuable tool to a large amount of people, but with the time that I've been using Maya, Blender just seems completely alien to me now. The course does need a little bit of modification because of the difference in programs, but it's still a really good resource to work through. I don't know how good the notes will be instead of just following along with the tutorial, but we'll see at the end of next week.

In other news, I saw the Kickstarter for the Newgrounds documentary is live! I definitely think I'll donate some money, even if it's just a little bit. Newgrounds and many other flash game sites were such cornerstones of my childhood, I feel compelled and obligated to help out in showing the world the impact of the one I cherish the most. Newgrounds is sort of past is golden age at this point I'd say (though that might just be nostalgia talking), but if I can come back to the site, then anybody can.

Thank you for having a look through this update! I'm very excited to get better at sculpting, so stay tuned for the progression!

Thank you and good-bye for today!

This week has been more of the same. Rigging, fixing things up, such and such. Weight painting is very tedious, but it's something I have to do anyway. In terms of things that are more fun, I've started hooking up expressions to the model to use in animation!

The way that the expressions made are very simple. I create a Blendshape target which has a slider which can determine how much influence it has. I can then edit where the vertices on the model to make the expression on the eyes. There's surprisingly a lot of flexibility that you can get away with with only a few expressions! The eyes above are actually a > < expression that I've rotated to make a happy face! I've decided that I'm going to give myself until the end of this week to try and finish up the rig for the model. Even though I've had a lot of fun making it, I feel as though I need to get my animation stuff sorted before I go to my grad course. I think I've found a good set of tutorials that I can follow along with to get a better grasp of the principles. I'll more than likely get back to the model once I get sick of animation again, I'll work on this again. But for the time being, if I don't finish this by the end of the week, it'll be another project on the shelf.

In order to get more done in a single day, I'm going to try and update my schedule a bit more. On top of doing 2 hours of modelling/animation/whatever I'm doing at the time, I'm also planning on doing 2 hours of sculpting practice. I've found a really good set of courses by YanSculpts which should help me pretty well. Granted, it's in Blender, but I'll take what I can get. I might see if I can follow along in ZBrush. It's not that big of a problem, but it's just that I have a really large library of brushes and such specifically for Zbrush, and I would to actually use them.

Again, this is another short update! With the rig making crawling to a snail's pace, it's unsurprising. However, I think it'll be really fun showing the progress with sculpting! I'll have to make sure that I keep my expectations for it reigned in. With sculpting in particular, I tend to overestimate my abilities with it. This in turn means that when I do something that isn't up to what I thought in my head, it's really annoying. I'm sure there's people who can relate to that. Biting off more than I can chew and such.

Thank you and good-bye for today!

This week, I've decided to forgo making my own rig and simply using a tool to do all of the heavy lifting for me instead! This way, I'll actually be able to get the rig done in the foreseeable future!

To make the rig, I've decided to use a Maya plugin called the Arise Rigging System. This is node-based system that lets you connect guides to bones in order to make a functioning rig. After watching a few tutorial videos on how the plugin works and what everything connects up to each other, it becomes very easy to understand how it all works. While I didn't make this from scratch, the plugin's biped preset helped very much in the making of the rig so far. It automatically makes different shapes for the controls, sets up IK and FK chains, and has helped so much in the making of the rig! I absolutely was not able to get the rig done just from using Maya's tools. I did not get far making it from scratch. I'm sure there's people out there that enjoy the rigging process, but I very much am not a technical artist. I'm very glad that I found this plugin in particular. From looking at other auto rigging plugins, a lot of them didn't seem to be as simple and intuitive to work with. However, the next part of the rigging process I hate even more than the rigging. Weight Painting is what is required in order to move the mesh with the controls. Depending on how the vertices are painted determines how the mesh bends in relation to the bones. Arise has a decent video skimming the basics of weight painting, but it's still a daunting process. I'm hopeful that I'll be able to actually pose and animate this character in about 2 weeks time. It might be optimistic, but it would have taken much longer without this plugin! I'm hopping to get it done in 2 weeks because I want to get back to practicing my animation for my graduate course. I still have about 6 months before I start, but I want to get as much as I possibly done so I can actually take advantage of the course. I think I've a decent tutorial series online, but that's still to be seen as of yet. I'll be sure to take notes so I can retain the info better.

This is a bit of a shorter post, but that's just how it is at this point in the rig creation process. Hopefully once it's done I can show more cooler stuff!

Thank you and good-bye for today!

First post of the year! Exciting! I totally meant to delay the post a day so it can be posted in the new year! I wasn't completely blasted last night or anything!

This week's post is going to be different to what I usually write. I didn't really do any 3D stuff this week (I need like, four skeletons that move each other just to make a rig the way I want....), but I have something that I think would be interesting.

Some time during the start of the week, my dad unearthed his old record playing setup from the shed! As well as a turntable and amplifier, there was also an equaliser, tape deck, and radio tuner. It was quite the find! And I'm quite happy to use the turntable for music. However, I did know that I wouldn't have been able to use all of the bits that were found. Considering that I only have one more power point available, I chose not to use the equaliser, tape deck and radio. The equaliser would have been fun to use, but since it wasn't essential and I have very limited space in terms of power I had to forgo it. They were also in a nice little shelf with a door that I'll be using to hold everything! It was incredibly wobbly when we pulled it out, but my dad drilled in some extra screws and now it stands like new.

A problem did occur when taking out the parts. All of it was completely filthy. Because of the general disarray of the shed (which is more of a garage to be completely honest), plenty of holes had appeared and dumped dead and dried leafs in the shed. Near the set up was a bird's nest! That's how bad it was. That meant that I had the gross job of cleaning everything up. The turntable luckily wasn't too dirty, just a little bit of dust. The other parts weren't so lucky however. For instance, the amplifier was dirty with webs and dust all over it. There's also some weird spotted rust or something on the top of it. I first thought it might have been some sort of bird poop, but poop isn't resilient enough to resist a wipedown three times over. I eventually got through everything and gave all the parts that I wasn't using a quick wipe. All of this in the night in the driveway. I could only think of what a passersby would have thought.

After the clean came the carrying inside. For anybody who doesn't know, a turntable and amp are VERY HEAVY, even when they aren't carried together. Because of how heavy it was, I didn't put it into my room (and I still haven't yet...Soon though!). I set up the turntable and amp on the couch for the time being just so I could check if everything worked. We also had a large choice of speakers in the shed. There's so many that I haven't picked what I want to use! I'm thinking of using the smaller speakers in there. After an embarrassing amount of time figuring out I was turning on the wrong sockets on the power brick, I managed to get it all turned on. I put a record on the turntable, turned on the amp...And nothing happened. There was some popping and such, but no audio was coming through the speaker. There was also the more pressing issue of a burning smell coming from the amp. I obviously turned it off as I smelled it. I did eventually get a nice amp from a second hand shop, but that's not really an interesting part of the story.

I knew that I was going to use the turntable, so on Boxing Day my dad, my brother and I went into town to have a look at some record shops. It was very lucky that all the record shops weren't at all crowded when we went. Every other shop was obviously, but it's good that records are a niche interest. To my dismay however, none of the places that we went to didn't have any of the albums that I wanted. I was looking for Quebec or The Mollusk by Ween or Rob Zombie's Hillbilly Deluxe. I'm not surprised that the shops that had mostly new records didn't have them, but the second-hand shops not having them was quite a surprise. I was hoping to find at least one of them, but nada was found!

After getting some more wire (which turned out to not be a high enough gauge for some of the speakers....) and looking around for a new amp, on Tuesday I tried having a look around at the record shop that was closed on boxing day. To my surprise, this one did have something that I wanted! It wasn't particularly high on my list, but I still wanted it anyway. It was the Blade Runner soundtrack, and while I haven't listened to all of it as I want to listen to it in my room, the small amount I listened to to check if everything worked was very good! The output was incredibly clear and loud, with a little bit of crackling, but that's just how it is. I'm happy that I was able to at least get one albums I wanted from my wish list.

Thank you for having a read of something that different than my usual posts! I did plan on doing some sculpting in Zbrush this week, but the record set up appearing was a very sudden and exciting new thing that I was hyped to get ready, so that took precedence.

Thank you, Happy New Year, and good-bye for today!