November ProgBlog #2: little touchups

Did I mention there was a lot of transitioning going on?

12yo is back homeschooling (kind of forced the issue and pulled her out as while she kept insisting til she was blue in the face that she adored school and absolutely under no circumstances wanted to quit, she refused to go due to being constantly "sick") so I've readjusted all my schedules again, and because I keep staying up late (I just work better at night!) I've stuffed up a lot of my own timing.

After I'd initially jumped to Blender I was so excited to be progressing that it took me a while to realise that I'd forgotten to colour Zara's scars. So I bolted them out but made two bad errors. One was continuing to use the grey as the backing colour (which was fine for the tattoos as I wanted to concentrate on the tattoo colours but not fine for the scars which need to be slightly lighter than the skin colour) and the other was deciding to use the fixed width variable opacity brush instead of the fully variable brush.

It didn't go well.

And I don't even know what was going on with those particularly bright spots, they were only in those areas and not on the other arm.

I had the scars on their own map which I tried valiantly to blend with the tattoos on the node tree as well as trying to colour correct using even more interesting nodes I found over a couple of sessions before I decided it might be better to just do them properly in 3d Coat and re-export the colour map to include the scars.

I roughly eyeballed the skin colour (because near enough was good enough for this and also 3d Coat does HSL and Blender does HSV or RGB and they don't seem to have a common thing) and painted over the parts of the arms where the scars were, and from there managed to pick a scar colour that was much less in-yo-face.

Now when I did the scars I kind of wanted to make a "nice" scar pattern but it's not like Zara was thinking of interesting patterns when she was franticly digging through rubble searching for her friends so I did them the same way I do when I'm drawing them. Semi-randomly in a way that kind of makes sense. When I did them on the sculpt mesh for baking, I couldn't see the paint layers (which was fine as I didn't want to). When I got back into the paint room I realised that she got her tattoos done over the scars. Due to her age her tattoos in the current block are temporary, she does get them done permanently when she's older and the bits going over the scars are probably going to sting like buggery if my experiences are anything to go by XD

The weekend is going to be a busy one but hopefully I'll get the colour map done quickly and continue nutting out procedural textures for the skin and lips which will probably take longer and for the lips at least may have to just add to the normal map.

This post also appears on my blog.

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