It's alive!

OK, lots of things to cover, no time to waste, let's roll.

I finished the professor. Yes, again. And I can already tell there are parts of him that will need reworking, but! He has reached another stage of development, one that I call "animation ready". Well, no, I call it "why the hell doesn't it work?" but more on that later. Let's kick off with a new and shiny render of the grumpy professor.

I know he doesn't look that different from his previous incarnation, but there is a whole range of things that happened under the hood. The major one: retopology. Another instance of practically invisible work that takes hours (and makes your arm hurt). Then, the not-so-invisible texturing. If you remember, I did an experiment with vertex colours a few weeks ago. Do you think it was successful in real application?

I won't keep you in suspense too long: yes, I made it. At first, I was slightly worried about the eyes, because the sculpture doesn't have eyelids (I need to remember to sculpt them that way next time). But the colour that was applied to the eye sockets projected well enough to the eyelids, so I needn't have worried. I did have to go and fix occasional white spots in the vertex colours, but that was a breeze.

When I was finished with colour-baking, I turned my attention to the rest of the textures. I decided to re-create all of them procedurally (therefore entangling myself from possible legal issues that could pop-up if I used Poliigon textures and then had some kind of revenue from the professor. Can't imagine a world where that happens, but better safe than sorry). I'd like to think that I did a fairly good job with the textures (not that they were too complex to start with). The inside of the cape has a little bit of noise bump mixed into it, to simulate the fine wrinkles.

So this was done on Friday. With two days of Blender holidays, I started to think what else I could do with the professor. I watched a few rigging tutorials, and decided to give Rigify a try. That's a Blender add-on that everyone seems to love because it generates a complex rig for you with a touch of a single button (and a little bit of bone-shuffling). I only encountered two problems. One, the version that's in Blender now is far more advanced than the one featured in tutorials. Two, the generated rig was an utter rubbish.

Well, not quite. I'm sure that it's immensely beneficial to someone who has deep knowledge of rigging. I don't. And so, when the hand bones refused to move with the rest of the armature, I had absolutely no clue where to go and what to fix. Trying to dig into the whole thing was about as successful as stopping a nuclear plant with a stern look. 

So there you are, thinking what a wonderful artist you've become, and then *BANG!* back to square one. Nothing works, you have no idea how to fix it, and if you find a way, you realize couple of hours later that you broke it even more. My initial approach was to read answers to some Rigify problems. Plenty of issues out there, not so many answers (and I only understood a fragment of those). So, in the end, I decided to build my own rig, with blackjack and hookers!

Only it was Saturday evening and I had to reluctantly admit that I was not going to make it within 24 hours. But maybe something smaller could be done. Perhaps... blinking eyes. How hard could that be? Well, two days and many, many swear words later, I can say that the professor blinks. Not very well, but he does. I will need to rework his eyes again, but not before I had some (well-deserved) rest. It turns out that manually herding vertices in order to close a set of malformed cartoonish eyes is... hard. Things keep poking out and get bumpy, and then everything seems to work until you rotate the eye and now new things are poking out!

I won't bore you with details of me struggling with shape keys and bones and animation gizmos, because the post is already getting too long. I will leave you with my first pitiful excuse for a character animation. It's just as good that I'm posting it today - I can always say that it was an April's Fool. (Sadly, it isn't. May I get better at it soon.)