Thoughts

I have been working on making these weekly updates lately, but a week or two I fell behind. I am already about a month and a bit behind the present day, probably due to making these after the holidays in January- and a lot of my musings and thoughts about work and my art have fallen to the forgotten. So I have added a new category to my report... some thoughts: my thoughts at the present time to get some public musings down and set.

I have been thinking a lot about what I want to do with the future this present week, because I have been getting lot's of good offers (in Week 12). I got offered a job to be a rigging professor in a local University, and also another North American job paid in dollars per hour- which would sum up to be well worth my while. But I have other commitments still, and the pressure is building - and also my dreams. They still are strong and crystalized in my ambitions, but I am starting to feel impatient. I need to keep on keeping on - and working on not breaking the chain and getting these weekly videos and blog posts out there is important to get to that goal one way or another. So.. there is a lot on my mind at the moment, with good work to do.

Performance

A casual week, with reasonable work hours, or productive hours this week. I still worked nearly 10 more hours than point estimates, but hit over half my expectations. I also started quote one client, but closed none.

The Painterly Project

There was a chunk of work done this week, mostly on the character and asset front, and new song art! Unknown Deejay has two new singles coming out soon, so we did the first and second art pieces for their releases. At the time of the writing of this post, the first has already been released here.

Here is a quick breakdown of how I did the album art:

To get this final result, I had to use my anamorphic slightly fisheye lens and film effects from the compositor over a 3D render from Eevee. I used the grease pencil for pencil stroke on the geo and in space, and I used Krita to make some custom grungy paper for the background. I then used some overlaying techniques to get the colours and composite.

‍

To render from the 3D view, you have to scle and setup the pieces in a certain way in front of the camera. It looks nothing like the final render, not even the final colours - but that's the beauty of the system. Later I render a little glitched loop for the video so that the camera can have a little parrallax almost for free. It also makes it a lot easier to see a near final render of how you want things without needing to repaint anything. It's a subtle but cool effect to get painted parrallax. It is all an illusion!

Character Design

On another note, I continued working the character, doing some revisions on the head design and some colour. I had to work his proportions and final design to make the song art, so it was fun to push the character forward for another project in the universe. I can't wait to see what and how I'm going to do the human character, which still remains to be a large question mark in my design mind. I have done a single mindmap of a single character, but I have yet to work the general character design rules. I also have to figure a way to economize the rigs to have.. if not... dozens of these characters in the world. I will probably use some mixamo rigging or posing for quick productions, but have a strong ghost rig or facial rig for actual posing control and acting potential. We'll see - but for now, the key character for the album art. We decided to illustrate parts of him as hints to what's to come.

Assets

I also worked a few downloaded and scanned assets from other kit bashes to then convert them to familiar cityscapes. I also worked the modifier stack, UV's texel density workflow and other systems to see if I could quick bake textures to vertex colours and setup the asets. It still is a bit of a process I should try to script more often, but it's something of a clear pipeline now. I have been using the Asset Snapshot addon and experimental asset library to save these as collections. For some reason I don't know why when linking they link both the linked collection data and the collection instance at the same time, but for now it's just a nuicense, nothign too out of the ordinary.

So all in all, this was a good week. Later I find, the more assets I have in the library to play with, the faster I can do animatics and layout - in fact, throwing in animation, lighting and viola, almost ready for final render. But the asset process is now the largest bottleneck. I am using a lot of CC0 and CC-BY assets, but it still is a time to process the sheer ammount of assets. But progrss nonetheless.

Other Projects

There was little or no progress on other projects. I actually gave myself some time to reward my daily exercise routines this week with some fun Minecraft. I also decided to spectate the Blender Royale instead of take part. But on a positive note, Bforartists 3.0.1 came out! Which had my splashscreen included. I love when this happens, makes it even more a part of my own.
‍

The Q&A&Critique 37

The Q&A&Crtique from Thursday also was a long one with many topics about compositing tips and tricks, some animation principles and more - very full!

• 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.

Summery

All round, the week was productive for the painterly, interesting with the QnA, and relevant with thoughts about this week.