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!