kaolinfire

I've been trying to move DAZ|Studio object into Blender with minimal success. The big deal was the import script for obj was broken in Blender 2.41. Fixed in cvs--so I grabbed the appropriate py script, and then grabbed its new dependencies... still one odd bug, but better. Now I could import the objects, but materials were still screwed up. Spent a good six hours on this, trying different export methods, converting through poseray, ...

So... I figured maybe that was because my scripts were now out of sync, give or take. So I began my next ordeal of grabbing source and compiling. Overall, the howto was _wonderful_. Just had a few kinks to work out (the first one that took the longest was my own stupidity... I kept trying to run the blender.exe that was dropped in the upper level of the install directory... which crashed every time. Installed a very nice (recommended from that tutorial) debugger, and still couldn't figure it out. Then, well, flashbulb moment--there's another blender.exe deeper in the directory structure, and that's the one I care about--which I _knew_ because that's the one I was told to "strip". Duh. Then ... what? Oh, I went through so many things trying to get that to work, wound up learning a little bit about my processor, and the like. ((figured maybe it was the compile flags that were broken; silly me!!!!))

Anyway, moving on--it runs, but the import script is missing the very files it was missing to start with. Go figure--they're in directories that were added after the scons script was built... or something like that. Did a quick fix, searched the bug reports, and noticed I missed a directory too! Fixing that made me notice my fix didn't work at all... but a little more tweaking and I was able to make a patch. Whee. Posted the patch to the bug report as the first step of having it committed ("get someone else to test your patch, then post the patch to the patch repository").

FWIW, my self-compiled optimized version runs so much faster! I'm wondering how much of that is that I've compiled very specifically for my architecture, and how much is the tutorial recommended cutting out some basic parts of blender (like the game ... mode ... thing) if you didn't need them. Not in the mood to test, but damn. Grabbed the firefox source and I'm thinking of compiling that to see if there's a speed increase there as well. :)

A new stripfight -- yep, it's Monday. :)

I did mine in 30 minutes, starting from 20 minutes to spare--and photoshop was NOT cooperating with me. I was going to rework it after the deadline, but I'm not sure. Is it worth a re-do?

Wound up playing in DAZ|Studio a lot more. I think I'm done tinkering. Still haven't figured out 'shadows' properly, but I managed to create something in Blender and export it to DAZ|Studio, and that's a HUGE step for me ((exporting from Blender to wavefront obj wasn't giving it uv coordinates, or something like; drove me crazy all weekend, netless, unable to research. Figured it out in a few more hours (well, give or take on the figured it out) after coming home -- http://uvmapper.com/ is the answer. Just import, export, and BAM, default uv mapping, and now I can texture in DAZ|Studio!

I figure I should sort and post pictures from the trip. (Thanks for all the well-wishes! I think they did some good. :) ) I'm not happy with any of the solutions I've used for such to date, but maybe that's just going to have to be the state of the world.

First, I've got 'web galleries' exported from Photoshop... I tweaked the template minimally, and like that perhaps best of all, so far. Would write up an overview/description on the front page. The thing I like least about it is that there's no metadata, no dynamicism. It's all just flat html, which means exporting to any other system is going to suck.

Then I started using Gallery, and it's... nice enough, but not quite enough, for me. I don't know why, but I'm really not happy with it. zotsf says Gallery 2 is much nicer, but I'm kind of scared of trying it. I think I tried upgrading to one of the betas a couple of times, to no avail. And then there's hacking its template to work with the rest of my site. Still, the data is somewhat dynamic and the code is opensource, so there's pluses there if there's anything else I _REALLY_ want to do with it. I remember hating how Gallery 1 was coded, not wanting to get my fingers wet... but I hear that was the general consensus and is why Gallery 2 exists.

Then there was http://mypics.alethe.net/, which was wonderful for a bit, but... just another albatross, now?

And scrapbook is cool. But. Eh. I don't know. =/

And no, I don't want to use flickr. I've got way too many pictures and I don't want to pay for it.

Actually, the first piece is technically not today's... but we'll let that slide. I was asked most kindly to go back and flesh out the covers of Dark Brothers of the Light, to bring them in line stylistically with, well, there was a strong nod to the Dutch translation of DBOTL #1. And since I was dying for an excuse to play in photoshop (relaly--I'd been wanting to yesterday, but had no inspiration. I spent all of yesterday pretty much exhausted. Did yoga for the first time in forever, and that just made me more tired. Bah! Didn't do it today--double bah. Told myself I'd do it after lunch, then ... kind of ... forgot to have lunch. Let me tell you I was starving by the time Amy came home (around 9p? 10p? Something like. When does Scrubs come on? Just before that.)

On with the show!



And now the choice --


or



or



or




for most of this, istockphoto was my bosom buddy. you may or may not recognize the helm, though, in the first of the two choices -- I made that for the render of the cover of book 6.

take 1 Nobody liked this but me. Pout, pout, pout. Okay, grass and hands rendered in blender. I didn't do the hottest job rigging the hands, after exporting the body from MakeHuman. My first hand-rigging. The grass is essentially the same as I did in the 'treefingers' render. Still not right according to the tutorial, but... eh? The stencils on the hands are drawn in photoshop, as well as some extra shading. Problems with this cover include the hands not being up enough for focus, and looking far too "bulbous". Some of that's foreshortening, some of that's the model (I guess? I didn't check hand targets for options), some of that's the lack of human-skin-texture-knowledge I still need to work on, and... eh. I was up until 3am on this one.

take 2 So after I get word and confirmation that take 1 is crap (give or take), I ... spend some more time trying to fix the issues mentioned, narrowing the fingers, altering POV a bit, ... nothing really seems to work. So I give up and go to istock and buy a royalty-free picture at far higher resolution than I needed because I misconstrued some warnings on the site and thought that meant I was going to get a clipping path. Thankfully, the wand was pretty decent, and I only had to draw on the quickmask a little to get the true clip, at low-res. As soon as I made the hands blue, though, they started looking _awfully_ cartoony. Spent a lot of time playing with levels and whatnot. Actually made them _more_ cartoony with a guass blur darken overlay (I think), which made them _look_ less cartoony--blended in more, thankfully. Re-rendered the grass, played with a few things, re-drew the icons (about ten times, finally got something like I wanted for the original picture, and I have to admit they work a lot better on this version). And hey, even the e-publisher likes this one! At least, "best so far" has to be somewhat promising, right? I don't think it compares to the dbotl6 cover, but I didn't like this one when I finished with it to begin with, and am just warming to it with everyone else screaming at me how good it is. So, hey, accidents happen, and my eye isn't as good as I'd like, it seems. :) The biggest problem with these hands as opposed to take 1 is that they're not as visible when they're really scaled down.

After reading a bunch of creative commons stuff, and after deciding I didn't really want to deal with all of the details of proper licensing, and allowing that to dissuade me from, for now, attempting to build a 3d model repository for creative commons and public domain stuff, I just posted my potentially worthwhile models to my own website, and claim that they're public domain. Which means... my own website has a new section... which means I reorged the top menu a little bit, because my god, there's a lot of clutter. Is it always the case that a webdev's home page is the worst thing they've ever done? No, it's not, but for now... yes.

Available now! Rough Wall with Broken Window Breastplate Helmet (round top)

I seriously doubt anyone will ever use these, but it would be cool.

You can jump to the Blood Arcane cover gallery to see the process, plus one shot taken from a different POV that shows all the spots I didn't patch up, and what the colors looked like pre-matching-to-background, and stuff.

take 5 TAKE 1 OMFG, I busted my ass on this one. Two minor things I sketched in photoshop (eyes, and pattern on breastplate). Pants, boots, breastplate, helmet--all made by hand. Oops. Just noticed the background was shifted one pixel to the left. which made the shadow a little weird, on the far right. Will fix if there are or aren't any other changes. Tra la I REALLY NEED SLEEP. And I (*#$#'d my camera work and had to recreate the shot; spent probably two hours struggling with that, and I don't think it's as good. But it's (*#$#(*$&(#'d close. I just don't visualize in 3d, or reverse-3d, enough to reverse-engineer the "perfect" shot. TAKE 2 Who would have guessed that each shot would be such a jump in practical knowledge? This time I learned a little bit about photoshop (limiting adjustment layers to a group instead of all layers under them!), and I did some mesh editing on main dude's face (the mouth, making it look more horrified, getting rid of that crinkle of smile), played with the coloration of his pants until they matched the sky, moved his arm so it was clasped more properly by guard dude behind him, and ... DUH DUH DUH... learned about assigning different materials to different parts of the same mesh! I made his eyes white (which didn't do that much good because I still had to paint over them--they were too bright for the mood I wanted, and I wasn't going to go to the trouble of creating an eye texture... though maybe that should have been the perfect opportunity to learn about UV unwrapping and mesh _painting_... er... next time!), and his lips pinkflesh (which I think turned out perfectly, after several very bad renders where he just had differnt shades of lipstick on, or lipgloss, or...). And I drew some eyebrows on him. WOOT! TAKE 3 My photoshop file now has layers called 'kohl remover' and 'wrist thickener' TAKE 4 tinted the top text to make it more part of the cover, then had to deal with the other text--the blue was really out of place, and then the white was out of place, ... TAKE 5 Friend noticed that pattern on dude's armor was glowing. Oops =) Changed "normal" to "overlay" -- MAGIC! Also cleaned up a few jaggies in flesh here and there. And filtered out two highlights that seemed out of place (may have been background, or may have been 'sun' catching armor in very weird way. _PROBABLY_ were just background that I didn't properly magic-wand-select away)

HAPPY DANCE!

WOOO!

closeup posing needs some work if we go with this shot. just presenting an alternative. A little less busy. :) and yeah, he's supposed to have an expression of horror on his face. But that's something I'll have to work on either in the pose or drawing... I thought I'd selected a good look of horror in MakeHuman, but... who knows? Oh, and the eyebrows are big and chunky. I maybe should texture those separately if we went with this one. Hell, I could try to texture the eyes and lips, even. Anyone mind if he's bald? Then... Hell. Who knows. Would be sweet to not do any photoshop touching up other than cutting out the bits that are the fake ground needed for shadow-casting... I really don't think I'm there, though. But. Who knows? There's not too much going on in this one.

Blood Arcane -- raw render, NSFW This is my Makehuman dude, rigged and duplicated into three different poses. It was fun trying to figure out how to get the two guys in the back to hold the guy in the front. Darkened the background, and managed to capture the shadows from the render but then cut out the 'ground'. Also pretty damned happy with the skintone I made up. That's a keeper! Now I just need to paint the clothes on, but I think I'll wait on that to see how the folks its for feel about it. Silly to waste the effort if I've got to even nudge the render the slightest bit. Oh, man, and it took FOREVER to maneuver a scorpion tail I made into position to get the shadow on his chest the way I'd sketched it previously. I think I'm really making progress, though--I managed to make a scorpion tail via icosphere push/pull and then extrude/scale method in not very much time. :) So hey, maybe the practice _did_ pay off a little. Oh, nifty fact--I didn't rig the foot _at all_ (I'll be drawing over with boots anyway, but they're stuck 90 degrees to the lower leg), and I didn't rig the fingers--the curled fingers on the top guard are me actually going in and editing the mesh. Quick and easy, _definitely_ getting the hang of some of the tools. Yeah, quick and easy, and I've been working on this since I finished the sketch some 9 hours ago? Maybe less, but I don't want to go see. And the L looking like an R... I see the problem, but I really, REALLY like how the title looks like pseudo-sanskrit, at the same time. And it's still 500% more legible than previous covers for the series. ;)

TreeFingers blender render, of course; little mirrored, chromish drops, a dupli-spun tree, dupliverted grass from a tutorial I read, and more concentrated fun with textures and alpha blending. grass tutorial -- http://lib.hel.fi/~basse/blender/tutorials/grass/grass_tut.php

trying to get my chops ready for cussedness' 'The Blood Arcane'. I'm about a third of my way through the book and have three or four scenes to choose from, none of which look anything like this. But hey, every drop of practice. :) There's a "cloth" tutorial on my list, which uses 'proportional editing', which... I need to understand, sooner better than later. I'm sure there's better methods for things (and there's always softbody cloth, but...), but... well... yeah. one step at a time, even if the step is largely lateral.

escape velocity Can you escape the rabbit hole?

Rabbit in the Desert Anyone want to ghost-write this for me? Lulu says the title "Rabbiting Sahara" is better, but who cares?

ryanne the rabbit (ps'd sky) pattern from http://rockmage.com/ I've done a moderately crappy job of articulating the rabbit, but for now, just so I can stop playing with it (I didn't IK the bones, and I'd like to, and... and... this was all of my Sunday and most of my Saturday and I have nothing else to show, so...). I've still got to do this week's comic! Sky done in photoshop with some brushes I found somewhere. Nice, quick, simple.

Yeah, yeah, and another 30 minutes in and I've got a cute animated icon.

It appears I did this one out of order, so I've got some reading to do--but I'm fairly proud of it.

I made all the textures myself (from photo references), made the room, made the glass (bezier curves), figure is creative commons and drawn over in photoshop, and the red thing--that's, er, supposed to be a fan. I took a prop I found and altered it significantly.



Blender, photoshop, wacom tablet, the usual. This and the last thoughts comic I did were both done (drawing-wise) with middling opacity on the brush. I'm liking the feel that gives, though I've got a long ways to go to refine it. Here it's perhaps too subtle. On the thoughts comic it's perhaps much too not.

susan on a platter, at the beach I found the most awesome tutorial ever for handling a problem with turning photosources into tiling textures. I've been bumping my head on that for years. And once it's spelled out, I feel a little silly for not "inventing" it myself. Of course that works. I've done signal processing. Duh. Anyway, I have a folder of textures... so I went through and did four of them right. Oh man, ana mazing feeling. Then I took them into blender, and did a quick scene. I really like how Susan turned out with a metal grating applied. :)

water tutorial (from here)

	ampitheater 1
	ampitheater 2
	ampitheater 3

space whale learning softbody motion and particles from blender 2.40 prerelease

Would definitely be a step up. :)

20050926_1613-UFO.avi (120k)

XVid encoded

UFO made with Wings3D, animated and rendered with Blender.

Found a nice Tree Maker by Blender Dungeon. Took some playing with (and a couple of crashes) to get something nice out of it, but I think I might have started to get the hang of it (started to, because I stopped once I got something I could run with). Next trick--exporting the tree without the script... and without losing the textures. ((the leaves, specifically)). Though I think I did fairly darn well for all that. Also learned some things about textures and bezier curves and the like, since last render. The whole "sleep on it" effect. And I've got more tricks (robot animation) up my sleeve, when I can get to it.

Blender rocks. All the people that support blender rock.

Anyway...



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All this is brought to you by the worst case of coder's block in recent history. I've got so much I need to not even be doing, anymore--just _have done_. There's no time for doing. I need to make this an obscenely long week, and I need to stop playing around. I need to get past this block on this one project, so ... stuff can happen. There's a lot more stuff that needs to happen. I was supposed to have so much more done this weekend.

So much.