As stated in the title, I tinkered around with trying out different ways to model! For my test subject, I've used my old Navi model as a baseline to try and recreate with cleaner topology and fewer polygons.

The first program that I tried to use for this experiment was Zbrush.

I did initially have a good time using the boolean operations that Zbrush had. The live boolean button is very useful for previewing what the end mesh is going to look like. However, I started to run into problems when attempting to use ZRemesher to retopologise the model. I was getting really ugly five-star points that I wasn't liking the look of. There was also the problem of the inside of the drill holes coming out really gross. I think that if I gave myself the time to really get in depth with how Zbrush can retopologise a model, I probably would have gotten a good outcome. However, it just wasn't working well enough for what I needed and the time, so I've ditched it for the time being.

What I tried next was a fairly new program called MagicaCSG.

This program didn't feel too bad to model with, despite my inexperience with it. There was a few problems I had with the UI and how some shortcuts worked, but not too bad. Problems started to arise when I tried to make the spherical part of the model that's smaller than the outer shell. I couldn't get it looking how I wanted to, regardless of how much resolution increases I was doing. It simply didn't look as sharp as I wanted. This program is really fun and can be used to make some interesting shapes. However, I don't think that it's a program that I should be using for this task. This much more of a free-form program than what I'm used to. There's also the fact that this is still pretty early in development. It's still only around version 0.4. There's also the fact that the free version of the software isn't the most up to date version of it. That's on the creator's Patreon. To be fair, though, their asking price is very cheap for a monthly subscription of an a program that is in active development.

All in all, I don't think that these programs are useful to be for the current task I've got in my hands. They're both very fun to use in their own right, but they just aren't what I'm looking for right now. I will more than likely just stick to Maya and figure out something in there instead. This doesn't mean that I'm giving up on making a better Navi model! In fact, I've got a little bit of a redesign in my head that I want to try modelling to see how it pairs up with the original one. Nothing is final, but I've got a few ideas that I'm willing to try.

This is a bit of a shorter post, but that's just because I didn't really do much this past week. I do hope there's some cooler stuff that I'll be able to post next time, though!

Thank you and good-bye for today!

Finished up my Horse animation that I had been working on for a little bit! It isn't perfect, but I would say it's passable at least!

Here it is! I reckon for a first go at an animal animation, it looks not bad! I'm not quite sure why the eyes vanished, but it doesn't really matter.

Something that I can never get right with animations is loops. I always I manage to get the end frame looking wonky, so it never lines up well. It's not really that big of a deal, but it just annoys me a little bit.

Now that I've finished up the animation, I want to try and get some of my other models textured and rigged for my other plans. I've already started to texture the Star Slipper, but I think that I might try and remodel it anyway. The way that reflects look on the model look a bit weird. That would more than likely be because of the topology of the model. It wouldn't be too hard to remodel it since it's a fairly simple model, but more so getting the topology right. The Navi model is very simple, for both texturing and rigging, so it's going to be simple to get that model ready. I will try to balance the rigging for the models and doing animation. It would be a good idea to keep the momentum going on the animation so I can keep improving.

I've also sent over my reel with the horse animation right at the front (so the client sees it immediately!) over to the recruitment agency. I'm not sure if I'm too late with updating my reel, but I'm still happy that I've been given the opportunity. A bonus with doing all of this recruitment thing is that, even if I don't get this job, they can still tell me about other jobs that are available! The woman I've spoken to is also very nice, so that's a good thing as well!

That's all for this post! It's a bit of a quick one, but that's just because I was focusing on a single thing for the past few weeks.

Thank you and good-bye for today!

Managed to get a decent amount of animation done for this week! I'm getting close to finishing it, and I would say I'm confident that I can finish it by the end of the week.

Here's what I've gotten done of the quadruped animation! I've still got a little bit to go, but I think it's looking good so far!

Obviously, it isn't perfect and I'm sure that there's parts that I can improve on. However, for a junior animation reel, I think it's not that bad! When starting out, I figured that it was going to be different to how animating a humanoid character is. It turned out to be fairly simple! Though that could be because it's a walk cycle and not something complicated. Something that I've also noticed is that I've been having a lot more fun animating this compared to following along with a set of tutorials. I shouldn't be surprised that doing my own thing is more fulfilling than doing tutorials, but I think I've been in a mindset of having to know the ins and outs of the animation principles before I can do my own stuff. Obviously that isn't the case, but it's something that's been in the back of my mind. I will get better if I focus on learning the principles, but if I'm not enjoying it, then clearly something is wrong with how I'm learning it. I might try to just animate stuff when I want, how I want, regardless of my skill or knowledge about animation. Thinking about it, it's probably going to be the best way of going about it. Maybe when I finish up this walk cycle, I might have a go at animating something more complicated with more body mechanics.

Next up, is a little sneak peak on for the intro animation I'm making!

I haven't really done much of the animation because my laptop has a hard time running the rig when I'm trying to move it around. It probably has something to do with how optimised the model is, so I'll have to get around to fixing that up. So instead of doing that, I've been transferring my materials over to Maya's Arnold renderer. I figured that I wouldn't have to since Maya has it's own built in renderer. However, after looking online for a little bit, people seemed to be in agreement that the in built renderer is only for pre-visualisation and isn't intended for a final product. Judging from my ZX8000 post from last year, I'm not surprised that people say that. Through looking at the standard surface node that Arnold has, it doesn't seem to dissimilar to something like Renderman. I've been slowly figuring out how to plug my textures into the node to make something that I like. Every render engine has the same inputs, but they just name them differently, it's just a matter of looking up the documentation to see what the inputs are. A problem that I ran into early was noticing that Arnold wasn't a big fan of the Normal map that I had made. This could be plenty of things, including it having the wrong UVs or being a type of Normal map that Arnold isn't made for. Something that I really like about Arnold is that it actually allows you to preview textures without having to render out a frame (unlike some OTHER render engine mentioned in this post). It isn't perfect, for example the shader I have for the model's body doesn't show up properly but I already know how that one looks so that isn't a problem for me.

Speaking of textures, I also had a little experiment using a low resolution gradient atlas to texture the model. While I am content with how it looks at the current moment, I feel as though it could be better. This is the video that I found on it. While it isn't guaranteed to work on my model (since I didn't model it with the intent of using this technique, and is for low poly models), I still want to give it a go to give the textures on my model a little bit of an extra panache.

That's all for this post! I'm happy with the progress I'm making, and I reckon I could have some cool stuff to show again next week!

Thank you and good-bye for today!

Finally got a goal for myself in regards to animation!

I had an online meeting with a woman from a recruitment firm for VFX artists (Not sure how to go about saying names, so I'm keeping it vague). She was incredibly nice and she was incredibly friendly through out the whole thing. I was very nervous about the meeting, but it was very relaxed, and I calmed down pretty quick. We had a talk about who she is, what the firm does, and who I am and what I do. She did say that as it stands, my folio wouldn't be enough for the client since a requirement is someone who can animate quadrupeds. However, she did make it clear that if I added some quadruped animation to my folio, she could send it over to them. I did plan on animating a cow, but after a little bit searching, I found that a lot of good cow rigs are fairly expensive, and I don't have that kind of cash. I settled on a stylised horse. It's not realistic, but it should be good enough that it can show my abilities.

And so, that's my goal for the week! It doesn't have to be completely perfect (she also made note that they have a grad in house, so it's fine not being perfect.

I also told her about my enrollment in my postgrad class. She told me that it's a good class to upgrade your skills, and that more than half of the students get hired when it's finished. This is giving me a lot of reassurance for before I do the class. I did have a friend who did a postgrad by the same people, but I was a bit scared of it not leading to anything afterwards. But after hearing good things about it from two people, I'm very confident that I'll get something out of it.

That's more or less it for this week. Considering that I've given myself a deadline until the end of the week to get the quadruped animation done, there should be something to show by the next blog post!

Thank you and good-bye for today!

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!