This week had a lower rhythm. But I have a new project in scope and a mind to work things - though I was distracted by my own desire to do my own thing this week. This week has a lot of focus on the painterly project, a character design, colour render tests and lineart - and more layout planning and mapping. I also work a Blender Royale and work the QnA. Other projects still are on standby.

Performance

This week had a realistic close to reality when it comes to needed points. I also nearly populated the sprint to be up to what I needed - but at the end of the day I only managed about half of the need working a typical 40 hour week. So efficiency hovered around half way. This still shows I am over capacity and maybe don't have the full mind to push the projects forward with laser focus. On the upbeat, I am still quoting casually - but with the strategy that I would like to burn bridges with high prices. Either it's a great deal for me, or no deal now. Demand for what I do is too high.
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The Painterly Project

I had a good time this week working and kitbashing a robot character. It was easier to build him from pieces than drawing him up immediately. The process involved some grease pencil to plan ideas, and I took my old DJ decks that I had digitized as models. I then worked the remeshing technique to get the soft forms to make the geometry feel more organic and then built the robot. First iterations were nearly a homerun! To help with the language design, I used a flat shading view of the 3D modeling to work the blockout - then focused on the colours and details. His colour scheme I'm still not sure how to work - but we will see how he turns out. I can already feel the love in the rig for this guy - and the fun animation. He's a true party bot.

Other aspects of the project was me trying to render out higher quality frames - working the shape language, colour and contrast. I noticed that my abstract cyberpunk designs were a little hard to read - so I had to work the ideas a little better to be much more explicit. But the colour contrast and luminance contrast is possible and necessary in the project - and after a vote the green and red contrast is highly necessary. I am happy to see my brush cloud technique handy to paint and blur detail per what I need - so I will try make a bit more brush like controls that are easily linked and overridable in the project - and also quick to setup to the camera. I am finding that the point cloud system that needs the camera is a little trick since you have to re-link cameras or animate nulls to cameras often to make sure the depth perception for the parrallax works.

On another note, I also was requested to make some song art and album art - so I started working cameras and models to make sure the final style is close to final frames. I also started experimenting with the grease pencil lineart modifier to define edges - and use them baekd for performance. I will definately be using this technique on the main characters for legibility, but not on the world.

So with the new lineart, the new character and the modeling techniques - I'm starting to make the world come alive. I also started freezing Geometry Nodes assets - because doing layout with them live has proven to be very heavy on my machine - best to work with frozen assets from the asset library. So.. I had a blas this week on the project, lot's of little detail and lots of progress on multiple fronts.

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Other Projects

This week had me focus mostly on the painterly, but I did do a Blender Royale Project and another Q&A&Critique session - each happening on Monday and Thursday. I'm good at holding these - and I'm keeping the chain, but I'm not sure where to take them.  

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The Blender Royale -Numero 75 - Prompt: Micromachine

This theme was extremely fun to do! I decided to quickly made a sculpt of a mite, then modeled and displaecd some micro details, manually placed some dust particles, and made a microscopic fresnel material with some lighting - all in under an hour. Was really fun. I then took a few more shots. I do these Blender Royale pieces in Erindale.xyz discord server. We have about 45 minutes to 50 minutes to make a piece live with a number of other players. I have decided to start pushing these as downloads for patrons.

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See more here on Artstation

Download from Patreon here

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Q&A&Critique 36

This had a good portfolio review with guest question by Jaybah. We talked of the following:
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• Open Question and Answer: "What do you need to show in a portfolio to be hired?" Some quick tips from the perspective of an employer  
• Question and Answer: Can you denoise just one object?
• Question and Answer: how to add a reflective "reflection" on glass like you see in product shots (ei, mix Eeevee with Cycles)
• Exploratory Topic: Introdution to the Animation Principles.

It was a very packed session. I'm getting proud of these, working hard every week to deliver these panels.

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Summery

In general, it was a productive week - so though I have high expectations, I'm still squeezing a lot of juice from every hour I sit at the computer - and my weekly progress is strong. Let's keep it up.