Posing my dragon

So I've made some progress on the armature in the last week. There's still some issues, and I think that making the controls more clear would help, but all in all not bad. I think the worst part is the way the feet deform when it's posed. I don't think you can see them because of the box, though. One of the design students who works with me has said that fixing the little issues is one of the most annoying / time consuming parts of rigging a character. I doubt I'll get more done this weekend, but here's two poses I was able to make.

Enjoy!

Modeling: Dragon Feet!

I'm getting more and more happy with how this dragon is turning out. The head and tail are a little strange, and I might go ahead and enlongate them at some point. I think the next detail to add is the teeth. I've also set up a camera and rendered the scene. All in all, not a bad days work.

Dragon Legs

I've added dragon legs to my model. They're not perfect, but the shape is a good start. Here are the photos.

Wings!

Happy 4th of July everyone. Well a day early. In any event, today it seems I'm going to post another segment on modeling. Since we last saw our dragon, He was a poor wingless beast. I've since added wings, and that's the major contribution since last time. I've been trying to figure out how to do the legs, and they keep evading me. Not sure why, they just do. If I try again later today, I'll update this blog post. For the time being however, here's some images of the shiny new wings.

3d Modeling: Dragon

So I started working on a dragon for my story, and because it's a fun modeling attempt. It's looking decent so far. I'm pretty happy with the head, though the horn looks a little strange. The body is still a work in progress, and I havent' started on the wings / legs yet, because they're pretty tricky to get off the ground. The little weird spot on the back is where I've set it up for the wings to come out of. Looks a little different than when I'm editing it, but hopefully it'll come together.

More 3d modeling

Despite the hangup of the past few days, I've still been working a little on the modeling. I downloaded makehuman to get a quick generic mesh to build off of (honestly it's a pretty good mesh, but since it's in so many peices (separate objects, not just groups) i can't really rig it or anything for poses, so I'm still going to revisit that), and have started working on some clothing / accessories. So here's a screenshot:

So it looks pretty good, I'm mostly happy with the design for this particular outfit. I'm still messing with a few ideas, but we'll see. The ovalish thing off to the side is going to become a sword at some point, even though the sword isn't the most appropriate for this character (I'm still working on how to make that work). I'm probably going to make at least 2, if not 3 outfits and a couple poses for the characters, once I get more of the hang of how this all works.


So far, the outfit is just using simple materials to get the colors. I've tried including some textures to add topology, but the bump maps don't seem obvious, at least to me. It might just be a zoom thing, and it might only be at render time, I haven't messed with it much. One of the things I am going to do is add a sigil for the character. I've started designing it, using Alchemy, but I'm not sure how i feel about the overall shape. Still, I'm going to play with it and try and get some more gradient coloring going on once I get home and can review the videos I have on how to do it.

As you can see, the shape isn't great, it's a little strange. It has some promise, but I have to do some thinking before I can include it into the previous work. The colors are also going to be played with, and if I can figure out how, i'd like to get the compositor working on it to make it glow slightly.

Character Modeling (Take 2), Book Review: Lisa Shearin, Jim Butcher, Julie Kagawa, Dan Brown, Kelley Armstrong

It's been a while since I've done a book review, so I have plenty to talk about.

Blood Rites
Book #6 in the Dresden Files pu the hero in a quite unusual situation. At the risk of a spoiler, I'm just going to say that he's investigating murders in a rather unusual setting. There were PLENTY of LOL moments, many of which came up because of the situation. We also find out more about Thomas and the White Court Vampires, which is pretty cool as well.
Dead Beat
 Book #7 in the Dresden Files brings Necromancy into the fold of things that go bump in the night. We get to meet more Wardens as well, which is something I had been looking forward to the entire series. Some fallout from an earlier book is also explored in great deapth, and this is the first time we see Harry truely outside his magical league. Refreshing.
Proven Guilty
Book #8 in the Dresden Files brings the character who's fast becoming a favorite into greater light. Harry goes to a horror convention, and sees his friends daughter all growed up. This would be so much easier if I was allowing myself spoilers, but I did really enjoy this book :)
White Night
For the last Dresden Files book this week, we see book #9. Here there's someone killing women, and they leave messages for Harry..messages that only he can see. His first love comes back, and adds to the complicatedness of the situation.

The Iron King
Written by Julie Kagawa, this book was actually suggested by Rai, even though she hadn't read it. A girl finds herself thrown into the world of Faeries, accompanied by the now-infamous Puck (yes...THE Puck). We see both the courts of Winter and Summer, which are lead by their typical leaders, Mab and Titania (incidently, Dresden uses them too, but even some non-Mab queens of the winter court are identified as the Queen of Air and Darkness. I think there's something here, but I've not the knowledge to chase it down). Still, we even see hte rise of a new threat, and the sequels still have room for a few big twists.

The Reckoning
The last book in the Darkest Powers trilogy by Kelley Armstrong(Site #2. Chloe and the others are starting to learn more about their abilities, and what that entails for them. This book marked the end of their original arc, but she's seeded the next arc, and they will eventually meet up again. She does that a lot. I also got to meet her on Wednesday, which was a boatload of fun. She read the first chapter from her new book, and it sounds like it'll be a fun read.


The Lost Symbol
I know there are people out there who will loose any respect for me since I've read this book, but  it was an entertaining read. Like many of Dan Brown's books, there are many huge infodumps, some cleverly disguised, some not. The plot was twisty but confusing. The portrayal of the masonic brotherhood was interesting, though not very flattering to that same brotherhood. It's given me the idea to try and work with some secret society things for my Mage game, but more on that later.

Trouble with Demons
The last book I finished (just yesterday in fact), was the third book in Lisa Shearin's Raine Benares series. The cover/title was for this book was what got me to pick up the series in the first place. The Demonology professor who got elaborated on in this book is quickly becoming one of my favorites. I hope she comes back. I've been on a Demon kick recently, and this helped with that. It also got me thinking about some more details for my magic system in my own novel, but that's for another post.


Character Model
So last time didn't work as well as I'd hoped. I did a few things that were, in retrospect, pretty obviously wrong. I've told some of you, but what I basically did was start over, and try a new method. There's still work to be done, but it's a much better start than last time.

First attempt at character modeling

So I've started, over the past few weeks, to try and model one of the characters for my novel. So far, I'm pretty unhappy with it, but it's  awork in progress. I suspect, at the moment, that I've included too many polygons, and it's becoming hard to clean things up, so when I make some small mistake, it blows up quickly.

However, in the interest of completeness, I'll post what I have so far here.

Breasts are definately harder than I expected, and if I went back and did them again, I might have a better shot. However, as it is, I tried it one way and am somewhat regretting it. The hip/groin area I'm also not happy about, though it's much better than it even was just this morning. All in all, progress but this is going to take some work. Arms and Legs are my next major area to tackle (as you can see, they're quite low detail).

Physical Description and my Super Secret Summer Scheme

Today we're going to talk a little bit about description. As a storyteller, I think description is one of my weaknesses (though let's be fair, my strongest strength is an average to below-average command of plot...). I've noticed it more and more in my RPGs which makes it really hard to set a good mood. I noticed this very strongly the other night when I was using a description from a module, for a body orchard (a grove of trees etc. which are basically made out of human flesh. Flowers w/ ears, trees with eyes and blood running down the trunk...it's a poignant image.)

So the trick of course is to balance plot and exposition. Margaret Roland wrote a post about this last week in the Magic District blog. Her big comment was that you have to balance what hte reader needs to know and what the reader already knows. Stephen King mentions in his book On Writing that adverbs should only be used if they change the readers perception of the event. Chuck Wendig makes a similar post in his blog post on physical description. His argument is that you pick one salient feature of your character, something that's exaggerated, and bring that description into play. What distinguishes your character from any other person. Jim Butcher mentions similar ideas in his post on Characters, between his arguments for exaggeration and his tags & traits model.

So I've come up with a plan to help with this, at least with my characters. We'll try and talk more about scenes and scenery in another post. So for characters, I have a hard time holding a good image of the character in my head. Certain aspects are usually exaggerated traits stolen from people I know IRL, which is a dangerous road to walk down since if they don't like the character, that's an issue. So despite my complete lack of any artistic ability, I'm going to try and create a visual representation of some key characters. Probably going to select a few characteristic poses, and maybe a couple other aspects. I'm going to use Blender, an open source 3d modeling software. I've been watching tutorials in much of my spare time for this week, and I think I've got a handle on the workflow and controls. I started modeling a simple cruciform sword, and I might post it online once I've added some more detail to it.

The trick with modeling people, at least at first from what I've seen from these tutorials, is working from a good set of reference images. At least 2 shots, one from the front and side in the same pose. The one people seem to like to work with is the Da Vinci pose, that he used to illustrate the proportions of hte ideal man. The problem is I haven't managed to find some reference images, and there's a few reasons I can't really ask anyone, most obvious being that the less clothes the better.

So the current plan is to try and get some generic body references, and then use whatever pictures I have (either on my hdd or facebook), to try and get some better individual detail. So my homework for the week is going to be to try and find images I can use for the bodies, one stock male and one stock female, and then we'll see about modeling that first. The other thing I'm doing in the short term is starting to think about poses, and props, for each of the 3-4 characters I want to model. Current plan is my 3 protagonists and my main antagonist, and then I'll go from there. May also do the lead character from my short story, but we'll see how things go.