Lady Octopus

Do you remember how I said last time that I was going to return to animation? And do you know what happens when I say stuff like that? Well, you've been reading this for a while now, I think you have a pretty good idea. I didn't animate anything this week.

But I rigged! A single tentacle, but it still counts! But let's start from the beginning, shall we? First off, I was on a vacation this week, so I took things a bit easier than usual. But when I did drag my lazy ass in front of Blender, I noticed that, for once, the Weekly Challenge had a decent topic. "A Fisherman". And I got an idea for a scene—that I'm not going to reveal just yet, you'll have to wait one more week to see it—and I started working on it. So long, rusty animation basics.

My biggest worry was the tentacles. Not in any perverse way. Although— they did stretch the limits of my rigging abilities and they sometimes ended up in places where I didn't like them at all. But I had to start somewhere, so I created a single tentacle, with a medium-dense mesh. I used a curve for it, with another one for a taper. This is a longer way of doing proportional scaling on a cylinder, but it did feel more professional. I then selected the sucker areas* and extruded them. A tentacle par excellence. Now, we just need to duplicate and position the sucker. Erm, tentacle.

That proved to be harder than expected. I had rigged before (never with amazing results, but still) so I thought I could handle that. How hard could that be, after all? Create a few bones and parent the mesh to the armature with automatic weights. Anyone can do that. Unless that someone decides to experiment with bendy bones. And parenting. Never experiment with parenting. The horrors you'll create are just not worth it. At one point I moved an innocent little bone by a millimetre and the whole tentacle warped into a monstrous blob of pointy shakiness, shot straight up and disappeared in the lower stratosphere. It reminded me of the blooper video from Pixar's Brave where they showed the hair doing all sorts of crazy stuff. Sadly, that's as far as a comparison between me and Pixar goes.

Anyway. I did manage to tame the tentacles eventually, but only because a chicken helped me. No, I didn't turn to magic mushrooms for comfort. I was referring to this tutorial. Nicely explained, short and to the point. If only every tutorial could be like that... And if rigging was less of a touch-and-go experience, that would be grand, too. (Anyone who comes here and says that rigging is easy is gonna get it, I swear.)

With the tentacles positioned correctly—and yes, they are positioned correctly, just ignore the long one for now—I joined them together and duplicated the mesh for a later use. Then I added a sphere for the body, booleaned everything together and sculpted away. You would be surprised how hard it is to give a blob with eyes conspiratorial and slightly cheeky look. I'm entirely inexperienced when it comes to sculpting movement or emotions, so this was hard. And as it usually is the case when trying to convey emotions for the first time, I got an octopus that looks mildly constipated.

But that didn't stop me, oh no. I finished sculpting and turned my attention to retopology. Remember the duplicate mesh from earlier? That came in very handy. I can't imagine retopologising every sucker individually. No, wait, I can, but I don't wanna. Luckily, I only had to worry about the body and the head. And with a cunning use of the shrinkwrap modifier, I finished it in no time. After which it was time for an early material test. And since blog posts generally have multiple pictures in them, why don't you have a look?

Not exactly mind-bending, is it? But it is a result of a lucky coincidence. I made the octopus dark purple—and then I enabled red subsurface scattering by accident. I kinda liked that result, so I tried to recreate it with a proper material. 

The latest version of Substance Painter offers the SSS option. In theory. I wasn't able to make it work. I have no idea why, I followed their instructions very closely and got nothing. Which meant I had to make the Substance version dark, splotchy purple and hope that the SSS will do its magic in Blender. It took a lot of tweaking, but I'm fairly happy with the final result. Only one question remains now: will the lighting hold with all the other elements in the scene?

But that's a question for another time. I reckon that I only made a smaller part of the scene this week, so I'll be very lucky if I finish it before the deadline. Oh well, no time to waste, see you next time!

* This post will require either a heroic amount of self-control or a squidload of bad puns. If you didn't notice the asterisk before and read the whole thing first, you should know the answer by now. If you haven't—buckle up.