July ProgBlog #2: shiny froof

Finally finished the gloss map for the scales! The belly scales were fairly boring and straightforwrd but I was still glad to be done with them XD Currently lighting the froof and am much happier as I like doing hair. Quite pleased with how it's turning out so far too.

A little bit blurry up this close and I don't think it should be. I'm currently writing myself some pipeline notes (not as I type obviously because I'm kind of typing this XD) including just making the model a lot bigger (as much as I really, really don't want to) because for whatever reason the SceneScale either doesn't work in the paint room or doesn't work at all.

I've taken off the shadow layer for now (Sprat's suggestion as I was unsure about what I'd done so asked her opinion and she said she preferred it without) and it's looking all right. I have one more method with the diffuse layer to try and if that doesn't work out I think I'll leave it off.

I'm also contemplating an AO map but as I've never done one before I'm not sure how hacky it's going to end up. But as I'm saving out all the maps separately it will at least be easiest to get rid of if it doesn't look good in Blender.

I had a moment of not being sure if I should be annoyed or not as I realised at some point that the sculpt details hadn't come over into the normal map, but couldn't remember if I'd done that deliberately and was going to paint the normal map by hand because I was having some serious smoothing issues (could not get the sculpt mesh smooth no matter what I did, there were always these bumps everywhere that simply refused to foad) or whether I'd just screwed up the bake. After playing around with a fork of the model where I was intending on baking a normal map and importing it back in, I eventually decided I needed to just normal map the fingernails in (most of what I need to displace) and fix up any shape issues in Blender as I started playing around with the sculpt too much (which would cause problems for the retopo model and probably the maps).

Once I'm done stuffing around with this one there's the phoenix on the other side, her arm scars, fingernails and toenails (ergh I better check Red to make sure I did that as I can't remember, I may have to redo bits of him anyway) and then she's off to Blender to see if the skin shader I made in Blender will work out better than painting in 3dC or not.

Only vaguely related, I recently got this song stuck inside my head (embedded the Spirit one because the official one apparently reminds Sprat of the screaming man meme).

Now apparently I can evict it by doing a sketchdump of three couples being cutesy and coupley (I think I'm trying to tell me I need to make up for a lot of conflict and angst over the last few years XD) but what it actually wants is something that's possibly a bit too spoilerific (and I actually don't mind just showing whatever and spoiling everything but I have had some indication from Patreons and others that people that are interested in my project generally don't want spoilers) so Sprat's the only one that's going to get to see it til some indeterminate time in the future when it will be safe to display to everyone (and by that stage I will probably have redrawn it or will have all the models required for the scene to be able to do a 3d render).

I edited the post on my blog to say that I forgot to add last night, it would be really cool if more musicians (established as well as new) would get on steem. I'd love to be able to make them post beneficiaries if I do music videos or want to include some of their tracks as part of my streaming soundtracks, and it's statistically unlikely that I'm the only one.

This post also appears on my blog.

Want a crowd character? If you interact frequently with me here (either on my posts or your posts or better yet both!) or on one of the linked Discord channels, all you have to do is let me know and tell me what you'd like :) It can be one of your characters (including ones you make up on the spot for this XD) or a self insert. There's a bunch of different human types to choose from, and pets/other animals are also welcome.

Thanks for looking! ^_^

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