#blender really doesn't like rendering stuff for me

[canadiankakashi]

Low poly possum low poly possum low poly possum low poly possum low poly possum low poly possum low poly possum low poly possum low poly possum low poly possum

[atomarium]

Wawa!

Now for real tho, how did You manage the iterator cube in the first place, I think My computer would explode just being near half the polygons

Have a 3d scug as a treat tho

Waw!

The question can be interpreted in three ways.

Technical:

just... Pain...I have an old 7th gen Intel i7, 16 gigs of ram, and RTX 3060. The thing is. When It comes to meshes, or hard surfaces (the polygons) blender is actually very good at handling a lot of them. But guess what blender does NOT like. Clouds, textures and displacments. I did the details in the cube first, and then sufferd through the pain and lag of clouds and textures.

Render times don't increase with polygons. This many poligons render a 1080p image in 40 seconds. You just have to be smart about hiding stuff you don't need when editing.

I can send you the model. It's really not a huge problem.

Creating detail kind of technical:

well it is indeed hand made. It doesn't take long if you blender very aggressively with energetic music. The first wall took me, ~30-40 hours. The second is barely visible so just a copy of that with modifications. I premade greebles and assets that I have later scatterd. You can see I reused a lot of stuff. In the project I am currently working on it will be different. But in this one, I tried to follow the doctrine of hiding the flatness of the cube. So it doesn't look like a cube with stuff on it, with fairly decent results. Made some holes some structures etc.. The plugins that I used mostly are discombulator, blenders inbuilt panel gen. And we'll uh. That's Pretty much it. Made a geonodes modifier, for the pipes. So it's easier, so that's a thing.

And the rest is just me trying to be creative and stuff.

The "how do I come up where goes what"

I domnt funkin know.

I'm an engineer. And that means I solve pracital problems. Such as, will this pipe going from here to here make sense? Or does it make sense to make this thing here if there is another nearby? I can barely be called an artist, or creative for that matter. I can't draw like at all,I just get anxiety when I try, I can't make anything that is alive in blender. Like genuenly anything.(including scugs :<). I am pretty darn new to blender with barely even 1 k hours. I looked at references of Cappins (the creator of the original 3d model found in OE.) Model, I got some inspiration from there.

Here is his model.

And here is mine ( low quality because I don't have the original on my phone)

You can defenetly see the similarities. I took inspiration from a lot of the stuff on Cappins model. Unfortunately I for some reason never figured out that iterator cube is not a cube. It's a uh... Pancake shaped cube. What I also like a lot about Cappins model, is that it's very very well balanced. Perhaps some technical details are questionable but at that scale that can be ignored. I later talked with him. And he explained me the meaning of primary secondary and tertiary detail. Wich is actually very useful. Go google it if you draw or model. As for my model. I'm happy that people like it but I'm not happy how not canon it is compared to other iterators. Perhaps, it's an older model of an iterator. It took me nearly a third of the time cappin took to make his, that explains the quality difference. And we'll he had to start from scratch.

I hope that answers all the questions, otherwise ask again. It's not like I'm gonna go anywhere.

(also pls gimme de scug model if it's okay)

[bosskie]

Cigar Demo

Yeah, I have kept doing Blender stuff, and today (yesterday) I modelled a cigar, for Molluck! I had an idea of how I wished it to look like and function, and I'm glad that I managed to create pretty much a cigar I wanted to. I tried to do smoke simulation stuff but well, it didn't look great and my PC ain't probably even powerful enough... Gotta figure out another way to create it, though I'm also planning to get a (more) powerful PC for creating stuff.

Here's a closer look at the cigar:

I wanted to make this look as much as I could like the cigar in Soulstorm. It's not perfect but looks surprisingly good still. I need to fix this a bit though since getting the texture to look seamless ain't easy... But I also wish to make that tip look better. I just wanted to already show this since man, I just feel like I might have gotten some new excitement for doing stuff since this 3D stuff just feels so 'cool'! Oh, and I'm glad that I have finally some Molluck animations I can show...

The glow I did is different than in Soulstorm cutscenes:

I'm not sure of how it's created here but that basic glow his cigar has might be a painted texture but also have barely noticeable glow thing. His cigar doesn't glow often like this but I wanted to create a noticeable glow in my animation. The way I did the glow was my own idea.

Oh, and man, I can't help it but I must say it, once again, that Molluck looks so cute in those screenshots! But well, this screenshot I took is to describe what a nightmare that sculpt's topology is...

These are the wireframes of the objects... I just added some colours via editing, from the rendered piece. That sculpt's wireframe is really that thick... This ain't the right way to sculpt. I do not even know how many polygons it has, Blender won't show it. But yeah, felt like showing this to explain why my sculpt is terrible from technical aspect...

I'm not sure what I do next but something that takes me closer to the thing I wanna create: proper 3D Molluck stuff, like professional looking stuff. It would be just so fun to create my own Molluck animations that relate to his life 'n' stuff, like what I wish OWI did. Luckily, I can do his voice but also the Sligs, so it is possible; I only need to learn this 3D stuff.

I know that 'a more Glukkon like way to do/be' would be to create original content but I can't help that Molluck is just my passion... How much moolah I need to buy him, even a license or whatever? Or if I marry him, is he mine then... Or if I just did a deal with OWI, if I ever end up doing some Molluck stuff I could sell. In one livestream, they said that they are open for such deals. I have seen some people selling Oddworld stuff without an official permission, I assume, but I just do not wish to do such. Though, I still struggle with my mind, feeling like nothing I do is worth any money... Therefore I feel reluctant to open commissions, even I could do them, but it's so difficult when I feel like my stuff has no worth and doesn't look good enough, including myself... I don't even know how much I should/could ask for my works... Even 5 cents feels too much right now.

I'm sorry, my self-hatred is just severe... Today, I just again felt like I should leave Molluck alone, just quit... But another side of me still tells me that my heart doesn't want it; I see inside my head how Molluck doesn't wish me to leave him either, that he doesn't really wish that I was someone else... To describe this shit I deal with like every day, I can also say that sometimes, in my fantasy world, I ask Molluck to end me or imagine leaving him in silence for a meat saw... But my mind still makes Molluck to refuse or make me feel too bad for him if I did it since I can feel that he loves me. It's actually rare for me, to feel loved, even my family has always given me much love... I just lack of something, making me feel broken, but Molluck has been somehow able to start slowly 'repairing' this. Yeah, from all the possible characters, it was Molluck that made me find true love. I feel a connection I have wished to find for years. Thinking about what my situation would be right now if I had never found him makes me feel quite anxious honestly... He is just so important to me and has helped me in many ways. Like, it's often difficult for me to fall asleep, so it's not unsual if it takes 1-2 hour(s) in bed before I fall asleep... It's just difficult to relax but I can at least spend those sleepless moments with Molluck and he is able to make me calm down when I feel too stressed or depressed to sleep. Sometimes, I just feel like I won't survive, but I'm still trying. All this practicing I'm doing is also a part of this.

I think that I should end this post now... I should go to sleep (with Molluck) too...

[moopadoop]

How did you actually start making these models or how do you basically have the motivation to do so, i really wanna try modeling like yours but im so confused on where to start😵‍💫

My motivation originally came from wanting to animate, but to animate in 3d you also have to know how to model, texture, and shade... As of some resources to start, I've included what helped me the most under the cut!

Getting Started:

Im sure anybody new to learning blender has probably heard of blender guru, if not, ill be happy to introduce him!

He's honestly what helped me the most with getting familiar with all the in's and out's of creating a good render, as well as figuring out how to go about approaching certain things. He also has a few older videos (blender 2.79 my beloved and behated....) that walks you through the process of creating different renders. My only problem with them is that they're a bit long...

ok hear me out, this actually really helped me with learning how to model in general. This tutorial may be old but it honestly taught me things like using the mirror modifier (an actual lifesaver), and how to approach modeling more complex shapes. Yea i get that the entire tutorial is kinda hyper specific but sometimes you just gotta roll up your sleeves and say "today im going to learn how to model a lowpoly elephant"

Intermediate:

have you gotten bored of making lowpoly elephants? Time to expand onto more advanced things, like people! One of the absolute best tutorial makers i've ever seen with my own two peepers is daniel krueter

Again, a bit of an old tutorial, its what opened the door to creating characters for me. He expands upon more complex box modeling, as well as introduces you to edge modeling for more specific shapes like the face. I'm pretty sure he also goes a lil bit into topology, and edge flow, but in case he doesn't the general idea is: quads are amazing and beautiful, tris can stay but are on thin ice, and n-gons are the devils spawn. (you know its true because it rhymes)

Two other tutorials from him that utilize 2.8+ and a lil bit of sculpting/retopologizing. To be honest I haven't really gotten around to watching these, but I would recommend the second one if you want a more in-depth look on how he did certain things, whereas if you want a general view of his process you should take a look at the first one.

If you're looking for some ✨quick tips✨ a few recommendations I have are Gleb Alexandrov, Cgmatter/Default Cube, and Ian Hubert.

Gleb Alexandrov has a lot of tips on just how to make things look a lil bit better, rendering/material-wise

Cgmatter/Default Cube do more technical tutorials, like how you would go about making certain things, abstract or otherwise

Ian Hubert is kinda like Cgmatter but they do more tutorials on things you would find out in the wild such as buildings, fish, posters, and scary nightmare men! (They also do a lot of vfx/hard surface stuff which i think is super cool)

And finally, leaning on the more advanced side is Dikko

he does quite a few tutorial videos for things like Adobe Illustrator/Maya both of which i don't have because im broke but i mainly really like their rigging/hand modeling tutorials. I'm pretty sure he introduces drivers for the different controllers of rigs and ik constraints, but im not sure because i haven't really gotten around to watching the whole thing.

Advanced; Learning to Stylize:

From here it gets a lil bit more abstract because theres no "right" way to stylize, whereas with photorealistic rendering most of the time there is a very clear line between real-lookin and not real-lookin. A lot of it is just kinda what looks good.

My go-to person for stylized environments is Kristof Dedene, he makes some of the prettiest shaders ive ever seen. (im a huge fan of his water shader)

he has tutorials for clouds, waterfalls, buildings, rocks, and grass which all look so good i could cry

My absolute beloved, my blorbo, my favorite activity. Sam Bowman is like the godfather of all things procedural, words cannot describe how much this man has helped me make funny lil designs for my funny lil projects. Everyone should watch his videos (and subscribe while youre at it, my boy is criminally underrated)

A geometry nodes connoisseur (if theyre doing geo nodes you know they got the class that wont quit). Their renders are really cool to look at, but geo nodes scare me so i haven't really gotten around to doing their tutorials yet, still would definitely recommend them if youre interested!

ok so if im being completely honest i don't know what hes doing, but in my defense i don't think anyone else does either. His newest normal editing series is witchcraft to me but i think its funny how he casually dabbles in the dark arts so im including him in here. He's covered a lot from uvs, to masks, to drivers, to shaders, but again they are all kinda advanced so proceed with caution.

And because this post wasn't long enough heres some extra people to check out who do kinda tutorial stuff (but mostly i just like looking at their work)

Bobacupcakes - Who i reference the most whenever i wanna make something sparmkly (i know the link leads to twitter but theyre also on tumblr)

Rukikuri - prebbty models!! (some normal editing too!)

Niall Stenson - kinda a grab bag of stuff (i just think theyre neat)

Late as Usual - another wild geo node wizard!

Dillon Goo - suuuuper cool animator (i like their fight scenes)

Rui - neato burrito 3d character creator (their textures are godly)

Dyzi&liz - im pretty sure theyre actually making an entire show in blender and i am both scared and amazed

Yoolie - another 3d character creator <3

高部 - テクスチャが大好き～～～ ;0; いちばんすきなテクスチャアーティスト！！

Nugget - Yet another wizard that dabbles in the darkest of arts (im pretty sure ive mentioned them before but in case i haven't theyre the person who's node setup ive been using for raymarching textures)

かめ山 - モデルはとてもかわいい～～

Im sorry that most of these people are from the bird app, but trust me they are definitely worth checking out

Super Secret Bonus Channel For Those Like Me Who Are Constantly Frothing At The Mouth For More Bnpr Content. We Want It, Crave It. We Lurk In The Shadows Waiting With Slacked Jaws And Glazed Eyes, Waiting For The Next Model To Descend Down Upon In Droves:

[agena87]

Simblr New Years Resolution 2024

I got tagged by the super awesome @plumbewb & @fl0pera. Thanks lovelies!💛

What's your Resolution for your Simblr? *continue making renders and get better at it (I'd like to make at least 5 per month minimum, with at least one of them for @camaieu-magazine; and I mean 5 renders with a full decor and all, not just a character in front of a monochrome background); *curate @wolfgang-munch and @malcolm-assgraab more often; *create/write more about/for my "Sacrélège" universe; *maybe have a BC of my own for [redacted] (MAYBE!); *go back to CC-making. All the time I spent in Blender since May making renders did actually taught me stuff in creating 3D objects (and I did create some for renders - plus I recoloured plenty of stuff too) so it's not as if I was not capable of doing it (I mean, I did create some stuff a month or so ago, but I never finished it and it doesn't interest me anymore).

What do you want from the Sims Franchise? I'd love to have a post-apo EP. Or a cyberpunk one. I want more dirty/broken/grungy/whatever stuff at the very least. Since I don't really play the game (if I leave CAS, it's to build 95% of the time), my wants for it are only cosmetic.

Any other New Years Resolutions? Nope. I never bother with those, as I never follow through. I mean, even the one I wrote for Simblr, I know I won't keep, so...

*

Tag! You're it!: @ezra-trait @igotsnothing @pralinesims @theosconfessions @mattodore @rainymoodlet @barbieaiden @minaevesmoths and whoever else wants to answer these.

[k00299539]

Disrupt Project Week 8 - 3D Printing Workshop with Jose Berna Moya

Above: The finished animation.

For week eight I ended up signing up for the 3D Printing Workshop, even though I didn't have much in the way of ideas on how to incorporate that into my disrupt project. Basically like always I kinda just signed up for whatever workshop was still available Sunday night.

Our tutor Jose ran us through the basics of 3D printing before helping us brainstorm on how we might leverage that process for our projects. This was a huge help to me and I really have to give Jose credit for going above and beyond to help us out.

The plan he helped me formulate was to model a 3D version of my clay man in Blender, figure out how to run a destruction simulation on said model, and then 3D print a few select frames of the resulting animation. Walk in the park...

Above: The modelling process.

I engaged in a battle of attrition with Blender over the summer and came out the other side as someone who arguably knows how to use the software, arguably...

In translating the design I decided to use a character design by Katsuyoshi Nakatsuru as a base for the model. I thought the funny square heads he did for the Digimon anime would read well in a low poly style. I wanted this to be a younger version of my much older looking clay sculpture. I thought basing the model off a favourite childhood series of mine added real substance to this. As you can see in the final render I did still end up giving him a beard and moustache in the end.

Above: The animating process.

With the model done, the next step was figuring out a good destruction simulation and the animating that. I was familiar with modelling in Blender but this part was all new to me. Luckily there's a great online community around this kind of stuff and finding helpful tutorials on Youtube was 90% of the work.

Above: The top two vids are what I watched for this project, and the bottom two are what I used to learn Blender over the summer.

All told this took a lot less time than I thought it might. This project isn't over yet though, as I still need to actually 3D print a couple of frames. I'll update my Tumblr again when I get to that, for now I just felt the need to explain what I've been up to over this week. A lot of my projects are nearing completion now, it's just that the timeframe of them doesn't always fit neatly into the weekly workshop format. The clay man for instance...

Above: Soon...

[ro-botany]

Bonus Content & Bloopers for the fake marlear screencaps

(I love behind the scenes stuff ok can you really blame me)

Ripping animations to help with some basic expression work was..... it was an adventure.

The first image above is an attempt to blend Marth's "surprise" and "smile" faces together but I uh...... Hit the wrong setting in the dropdown. I nearly died from laughing too hard pff.

The Alears there are what happens when you import the characters face rigs with different settings (still screaming at myself for that one) and then try to use a facial expression from one of them on the other one of them. That was supposed to be an :0 face.

The FEH players among you may have recognized the setting of that piece as the scenery for S supports in FEH! Figured if I'm setting the scene in Askr anyway I may as well go for the cheekiest spot. :P

While it probably would've looked great if I'd modelled all that out, after the effort that went into getting the character models looking good I really just did Not have it in me to do that, so this scenery is... A complete and utter lie made of layered image planes.

This was part of why I opted to crank the depth of field so much in the final piece. Helps hide that everything aside from the guys themselves are crusty PNGs. :P It does a half-decent job of looking like a 3D scene even in motion though, so long as you don't rotate the camera TOO far.

I REALLY liked how these close shots of Marth and Alear for the first pose turned out, but in the end I didn't think they fit with the other two poses. There was a timeline where I modified the expressions a bit and made fake dialogue boxes where they're talking about how surprised and happy they are they can actually touch each other in Askr, but I didn't feel confident enough to write in their voices for that.. So in the final shots that story just gets to be implied in their poses and expressions instead.

For the hug shot, I feel it is important to reveal that Alear's head is clipping halfway into Marth's shoulder and armour there. It's fine though. Animate for the camera, professionals always say! If it isn't gonna be viewed from every angle it doesn't have to look good from every angle. :P

Engage renders their characters' eyelashes and eyebrows ABOVE their hair, no matter what, in order to help the readability of facial expressions. I wanted to stay true to that look, so I had to render their eyebrows and eyelashes separately and then combine them in post. Enjoy eyelash-free Marth and Alear. :P

You can also see some areas there where I had to manually fix some shading and outlines in post, too. Blender has a bug with rigging right now that was affecting the face shading in odd ways, so I painted over that; and the inverse hull method I've been using for most of the outlines is very much imperfect and needed touching up in some areas, lips especially.

Since these character rigs were.......... We'll say not intended for use in Blender, they were fairly tedious to get posed right. No rotation or location constraints. These were joint-only rigs with no connections between bones so you couldn't use the auto-IK feature to, say move the whole arm at once. (Which made hand posing the WORST THING EVER AAAA EVERY FINGER JOINT MOVES INDIVIDUALLY why did i pick TWO poses where hands were a critical component)

Part of my process ended up being doing rough sketches of what the final shots were going to be first, so I could keep in my head what sort of poses and expressions and camera angles I was going for. And by rough I mean ROUGH. I kept laughing looking at these little egg head guys for reference as I worked.

Engage's models also come with some "extraneous" bones; "piv" bones that I can't figure out what they do, spots where weapons and shields can snap to, "vol" bones for changing the thickness of specific body parts as defined in the big XML file of character proportions buried in the game. Unfortunately these bones overlap the actual posing joints in many cases, so until you get fed up enough to find and hide them all, you'll try to move the character around and end up doing shit like this by accident

(Me too Marth, idk what the hell his skeleton is doing either)

And as you may have noticed - no particle effects in these behind the scenes shots so far! That's because I both A) couldn't for the life of me figure out how to do that smoke effect, and B) couldn't render a particle system with anywhere NEAR the number of objects I would need to get a similar look to the game. So, I drew those in post! Shoutouts to the random sparkle and smoke brushes in my collection, you're the real ones.

[thursdaysrain]

my experience with blender and unity, together, has been a bit of a nightmare, but separately they haven't been bad. unity i've had issues with but they always felt surmountable, like, no matter what i can work around this problem.

blender i just enjoy, it has this reputation as like a weird badly designed software but maybe that's gone away w/ recent (recent as in.. years ago) ui changes. new features have been great and there isn't much for me to complain about here, but idk what a new user's experience is like. it's hard to tell people who ask me how to get started what to work with, bc everything i learned from is out of date.

the real headache comes from the transition between the two, which has been a real nightmare for me. once i'm all done working on wormgrubber 2.0, i need to put together workflow document to reference whenever i'm working on new 3d assets for unity in the future. it's a big list and it's been a real pain to discover each problem one at a time.

first and foremost it is obvious to me now that blender is not gamedev software. when i started gamedev, i split my time between learning shaders and learning 3d, not touching animation and mostly focusing on making little model display art pieces. i did this for a couple years. rigging was always a huge pain in the ass, weight painting moreso, so i just avoided it for a while. when i brought my first fully rigged piece into unity it was a nightmare, nothing looked right at all. this kind of thing honestly traumatized me, lol. i spent so much time trying to obsessively make perfect rigs bc i was terrified by shapekeys and drivers, horrified to spend hours setting something up only for it to be useless. this was wrongheaded for multiple reasons... there are so many features in blender that are just not relevant to unity and/or don't export through the only 3d format unity uses, fbx. this makes sense if you think about it for a bit, blender has a lot of features for rendering 3d animation and art but a lot of this wouldn't work in a realtime game, it's just too intensive. but! if you spend all your time learning 3D instead of specifically learning "3d for game animation" you come to lean on things like corrective smoothing or other modifiers.

3d is a weird mix of like, destructive and nondestructive workflows. blender will often let you work your way into positions you cant easily recover from without a lot of extra work or discarding work, setups that work fine within blender but absolutely will not export to unity. things like being unable to apply modifiers to models with shapekeys, but needing to apply all shapekeys to properly export a model, etc.

unity does this thing where it has very specific ideas about how things should work and it only tells you what it's doing maybe like 20% of the time. everything else is up to you to figure out the hard way. im not sure yet if this is an fbx problem or not but interpolation settings in blender aren't exported to unity, so it just comes up with its own. unity doesn't play the last frame of an animation. this makes sense for some contexts, because an animation is an interpolation between a start point and an end point, but like, nothing in unity tells you this the case. whenever i search for these things i always find forum posts, not unity documents. and you cant really change it without clumsy code slapped on top bc so much of this is below the closed off part of unity's code.

make games this way, not that way. i used to always think that when i was struggling against unity it was a sign i was designing something poorly, but now i know enough to know it's often because unity is itself struggling under the weight of choices made years ago, or half finished projects with poor documentation. arcane rules and practices i don't know bc i didn't go to college and because the knowledge is typically split across like several different jobs in a normal large studio.

i don't know how you learn this stuff other than trial and error. maybe in a college?? i dont know how other self taught indies deal with it. tutorials on youtube/etc seem to be split between like teaching you isolated tricks or teaching you very specific workflows without telling you exactly why you can't do this or that. blender tutorials are often for non-gamedevs, and unity tutorials are about following unity's design decisions without explaining them.

i know creating tutorials is a lot of effort and it's impossible to be fully comprehensive, but for something as common as 'take blender thing and put it in unity' should be for indie gamedev, i dont get why i havent seen more grumbling about this. i feel like every major snag i've come across (ones mentioned here are only a few of them) i was completely clueless about until i started doing some digging and the only thing to save me is some post from like 2016 on the unity forums.

its been a struggle!!!! i know i'm getting closer to the end of the tunnel but like every time i think it's a straight shot some new pit opens up. still, i'm getting there. my short advice to anyone is to always iterate, if you are trying to make art for games, make some art and put it in gamdev software. see what you like about it, how your desired workflow works with the software, etc. these skills arent separate, they have to be tied together.

[clowndotgay]

if you dont mind me asking, how do you do the card renders?

so i'm not 100% sure how to answer this because its kinda vague - i'm not sure if you're asking about the card (image editing) part or the rendering process! if you want to know about the process of getting the characters and areas into blender, i've written a few posts about that already - they're under the "toontown models" tag on my blog, so they shouldn't be too difficult to find. RAMBLING ABOUT IMAGE EDITING BELOW THE CUT EXCLAMATION MARK EMOJI! THIS ISN'T A TUTORIAL IT'S JUST ME TALKING!!!! (only slightly related, but i'm putting it above the cut so more people might see it - i wrote some mock pokemon cards for managers a bit ago but i don't want to make them full images, would anyone be interested in me just posting those as text?)

the actual image editing part i do in photoshop! it's kind of a bad program but my usual art program dies when i try to do what i do for cards because it kinda struggles with text. i've started doing the text in-render for the cards recently, though, because it's kind of a blast?

it's probably obvious to anyone who's looked at them hard before, but my mock cards use the Series 1 Cog cards as a base (the official Disney ones)

they've just got a sort of weirdly unhinged vibe to them, they're so far off of the cogs representation in-game and kinda gives a look at (imo) how the cogs were originally imagined, as I feel that some of the card art is closer to original concept art (or probably is concept art) than it is close to in-game character appearances. man, Cold Callers card doesn't even look like the same guy! he's lanky here!

and i mean, kinda obvious, but i can't get the same level of craziness these cards are on with renders, but i can try. so i do! it's fun!

i don't know if anyone has really noticed it, but for the last handful of cards i've been opting for colouring the border of the card dependent on the department of the cog. green for cashbot, pink for sellbot, etc. here's a test i did of it a couple weeks back when i was playing around with the idea in my head (the renders were randomly chosen):

(the boardbot colour is kinda subtle - but that's just how it is in-game, exe bd skelecogs are super close to exe lb skelecogs, but maybe that's just my eyes)

the actual "process" of putting the card together once i've done the render is kinda just plopping the render into the .psd and telling photoshop what department the cog is (for the border colour) & then i'm done. the file is super simple, it's just a series 1 card but i edited everything out other than the border, bunch of layers connected to the border that give it the department colours, layer of a kinda-crappy filter i slap on to try and give it the same "feel" the card scans have, layer for the text (optional now that i do it in-render), layer with the render.

there's some extra fun stuff i try and do with effects in the renders, but i'm kinda new to messing around with blender stuff like that, so i try and hold it to a minimum. as an example, the CFO render is kinda hue-shifted so i could get the colours closer to what i was basing the lighting of the render off of! to use a better example of silly effects i used for a card, i'm gonna talk about this high roller card:

dude this thing took forever because i wanted to do Everything in-render (would've taken way less time if i wasn't stubborn). it's a bunch of layers and gradients and shine. i'm kind of tipping my hand here, but there's straight up just a blindingly bright cube in their hands that's making the shine, and then i kinda just. told blender to add a lens flare. and it did. i had to simulate rain for that one misty render and that was a time. y'know. i actually have to finish up a commission where there's blinding light emitting from something and it's really really good and probably one of the best renders i have done and it is 99% thanks to the commissioner because the ask is So Good.

anyways that's kind of all i wanted to say. i hope this answered your question? maybe? was your question just "what do you make them in?" if so, it's blender and photoshop. sorry for making you read a text wall instead. at the risk of sounding too silly, i really like speaking about the things that i do, but i feel weird talking about them unprompted? so i took this as being prompted and talked.

[eldrichthingy]

8, 12 and -8 for the ask game 🥰!

Hope your day’s going great Olya!!

Hello!! :') Thank you so much for sending me an ask, Marine! 🥺💗 I'm always so happy to see you in my inbox! 🙌🏾

8 - type of dream?

I'M SORRY BUT MY HORNY ASS IS BEING HORNY AGAIN. I love nightmare-ish sex dreams, I don't know how to explain or if I should do that. Like... sometimes I'm having very extreme dreams — with the mix of horror and erotic, weird creatures and stuff like that ;:) they're usually extremely WILD, but sadly, they've became rare for me. Oh, and! I think my second favorite type is vivid dreams and the dreams that don't make any sense and just straight up unexplainable. I just love wild and fun dreams! 👉🏾👈🏾 Also, definitely worth mentioning: nightmares featuring my own OCs. That sounds really weird (because maybe it is lmaooo), but I've had a lot of nightmares about Eudelme chasing me and like... killing me very violently for a small period of time and I was having a hard time playing that save :')) It made me extremely anxious, BUT it gave me the most insane inspiration boost in terms of creating great lore!

12 - creative medium?

If I understood the question correctly (today's the day when my English said "goodbye" and dramatically walked out of the window), it's writing!! I absolutely suck at it for now, because I'm very inconsistent with practicing it and I'm having a hard time writing in english in general. If I write, I write it either in russian or in german... so it's no surprise I'M BAD AT THIS skjsks. Writing is my favorite thing to do in terms of creativity because it's... It's very flexible, idk how else to put it? I love writing. Yeah! I'm trying to have a writing schedule and force myself to write in english! It doesn't work out yet (ADHD thank you) and I don't know if it will before I will have a full fucking burnout! 🙌🏾 nothing truly gives me this much freedom in terms of creativity as writing. Oh, and also! It's doing edits and renders for Sims 4! That's the first reason why I even started a simblr, although once again, I suck at it a lot lmaoo, but I'm having a lot of fun with this! Especially in Blender, where everything and every single little detail is adjustable, having a lot of control and the flow of creativity is amazing, not being limited is amazing!!

18 - constellation?

OH NOW THAT'S A DIFFICULT ONE. I had a hard time choosing, but I think that's going to be Corona Borealis. First of all, I love it's name and I think it's just.. gorgeous. And so fascinating.

[criisolate]

hi, its me again! i just had more questions about making renders! i've been really into doing them and i want to pose the render of the sim i am making a render of, (sims 3) but whenever i bring the render of the sim i want into blender, it doesn't show all the joints and stuff like that (if that makes any sense); i was wondering if you pose the render or use custom animations and such? or if there's any proper tutorials for posing your render!

Hi~ Here's how I pose my sims. I'm not skilled at blender so there must be other better methods.

First if you want to use custom poses or animations, you can click Append and select them from Action folder. The blend file you append should have sims 3 animation files already imported so that you can find files in Action folder. You can't directly import sims 3 animations cuz it will twist the sims.

Then select the rig layer, switch the editor type to Dope Sheet and change it into Action Editor Mode.

Click New and select the pose or animation you had just appended. Now your sims should pose correctly.

If you want to adjust the joints yourself, you can select the rig and switch into Pose Mode and then pose your sims whatever you like. You can also unfold the rig layer and hide any part to help you adjust the joints more clearly. At last, don't forget to click a (select all the joints) and i. In the pop-up menu, click LocRotScale to insert keyframes.

Sorry I'm not a native English speaker, it's hard for me to write tutorials in a rather explicit way😢 You can also follow these two tutorials 1/2 to learn more. The only difference is that I use blender2.7x for rendering.

[lil-tachyon]

Another year- and a big one at that. Surprisingly, I actually feel like I met most of my art goals from last year. Coelum got released after several years of work. Burzok's got done too, and I should finally have my grimy fingers on a print copy in the next couple weeks. Biggest of all, I quit my engineering job to do art for a living (which has pretty much been my goal since my first week of having a job). Big stuff.

Goals for 2022:

-Come up with a framework for making money. The cruel reality I must face. Not actually that bad, everybody's got to do something for a living. Right now I have ample commission work and I actually quite enjoy doing it, but per hour it really doesn't pay that much. I will probably be revising pricing soon once I catch up on the commissions I owe people. Will also be trying to cultivate alternative revenue streams (hey did you know I have a Patreon where I post sketches and previews and unreleased art?). This is going to involve experimentation. I think the best thing, long term, will be to release more books. Not all of them will be successful but ultimately for financial independence, having something I can sell is probably the way to go. Plus I love doing books.

-Get a website and a mailing list up and running. I don't want to be dependent on social media to get my stuff out there. I'd like to have more control over how my drawings are presented. Very long term, (years down the line) I'd like to get off social media entirely. I don't want to be a father with children and still be checking twitter, that's embarrassing. Plus it'd be helpful to direct people to a gallery instead of typing in my stupid username on instagram whenever people ask to see my stuff. I think I can get a basic website up by end of January, that's the goal at least

-Experiment more! The upside of doing so much client work this year is it helped me cultivate a reproducible, recognizable style that I'm proud of. The downside is I haven't been able to mess around with different media, tools, workflows, etc. What is real art if not experimentation? I am glad that I'm finally working towards consistently painting stuff I'm proud of, but I only finished 3 paintings in 2021. Unacceptable! However, already since I've been doing this full time I've been messing around with new stuff daily, so I hope to see the fruits of that by the end of 2022.

-3D. I'm not really into 3D art super much but I've recently found some artists I really like and want to emulate, plus talking with some professionals they recommended I pick it up as a skill. On that note, I've been teaching myself Blender for the last couple weeks. This one's slow going and I probably won't be able to lean into it for a few months, so don't expect renders from me any time soon.

-Burzok's sequel. Not necessarily a direct sequel to Burzok's Mercenary Handbook, but myself and the rest of the Burzok's editorial team are already in early talks to do another book together. Don't expect news until at least spring, though.

-Not art related, but I barely got to play music in 2021. More time spent playing guitar and banjo is a must for 2022.

That's about it. I should note that none of this would be possible without my wife working insanely hard to support us and I love her for that and so should you. Peace out, Happy New Year you dweebs. Thanks for sticking around.

[brightwanderer]

I like how your 3D rendering of Aziraphale looks so far but gosh he looks like a creepy yet endearing mix of a Telletubby and... some kind of doll or maybe Barney the dinosaur if you squint? Idk its super cool and he's kinda cute but a little uncanny too. Great job so far!

I've never done anything except download and open Blender once many eons ago and then almost immediately nope out of it because it was so complex and scary looking. I find it really amazing that people can create things that are 3D and they look like drawings but... kinda aren't. Idk but its just super cool to me. I used to watch some sped up YouTube vids where people made these insane and amazing creations in Blender and i was so blown away, I dont remember any channel names now but surely they're out there somewhere lol. But its been a long time so your stuff is my first recent dip back into the "awesome world of 3D creations" pool. I especially liked your Stardew farmhouse, that was so cool! Didn't you make that in Blender too? If I'm remembering correctly and you did, that's just. That's just awesome. It doesn't LOOK 3D but wow. Still so cool. It was so different from the actual game but still very easily recognizable (and its one of my favorite games and I might just about die for a Stardew AU fic lol though I haven't found one yet). It looked so nice and cozy and I loved the colors!

Anyways I can't wait to see what Az looks like when he's finished, and good luck with his hair btw, I can't even imagine how challenging that's gonna be. Best of luck to you! :)

LOL yes 3D modelling characters is basically a process of putting up with the uncanny valley until you get to the part where you start working on the textures and lighting. One of the reasons I'm not particularly interested in photorealism in 3D modelling is that it's so, so difficult to really nail character art in that style, and I don't have the time or dedication to put into it. (The other reason is that I just really like toon and stylised art.)

All of my modelling is done in Blender, but I'm not modelling the characters themselves from scratch. I'm using Daz 3D, which comes with very customisable basic human figures and a lot of built-in pose and expression controls. I can set up characters in Daz by moving sliders around, much like on a game like the Sims, and then export the model to Blender to work on the clothes, hair, texturing, etc. The results are good enough for my current purposes, though there may come a time when I need to start pushing seriously towards modelling my own figures... we'll see. I did do the Stardew farmhouse entirely in Blender though! Speaking of which...

"I might just about die for a Stardew AU fic lol though I haven't found one yet"

... OH HEY DO I HAVE NEWS FOR YOU. The reason I made that model in the first place was because of my story "Untitled Stardew Omens Fic". It is 43k of ineffable farm fluff. I hope it's what you're looking for!

[linuxlife]

Linux Life Episode 67

Hello ladies and gentlemen and welcome to my ongoing quest regards Linux.  Well I did say I was getting frustrated with the slowness of Manjaro well due to having to fight with it virtually every time when I built something from the AUR.  I eventually had enough.  So now the i7 desktop is now running Archman Mate.

The problem with Manjaro as I said was it seemed to be sluggish to load, respond and generally work.  It did work but for some reason everything took far longer than it should.  Also building anything would be problematic.

I will explain what I mean.  Now Arch has a tendency to build from source which is not a problem.  However most Arch versions with the exception of Manjaro if they script is in the wrong order it will normally correct so it will be able to build the program.Manjaro will just stop dead make you find a series of libraries which itself could have made.  It's counter productive.  Now I know sometimes AUR scripts are not perfect but just installing say Fuse the spectrum Emulator.

It uses libspectrum now every other Arch distro I have used discovers this and build this first and then Fuse.  Manjaro just stalls, informs  libspectrum is needed and stops.  So now I have to go back to pamac install libspectrum first and now I can install Fuse.  I'm sure someone seems to think this is a good idea as you see what you need before building the program in question.

However I just need a program to work and find all these unnecessary install steps annoying.  If it needs such then like every other version out there install the library first and then build.  However it will stop warn and not install.

This is very much like the old issue I used to have with Debian when it will inform you of the dependencies but not where they are.  So you end up installing one library, then another, then another and still may not be close to being able to install the program you want.

It's inconvenient.  I really don't understand how Manjaro is listed and praised so highly.  I really don't.  I have found it slow, obnoxious and obstructive.  But for some reason people like it.  Well let's just say I don't.

If you like Manjaro that's your prerogative.  To be honest I admit I think I am pretty fussy about things.  This is why I have shifted many times and through many versions of Linux.

Don't get me wrong now I will at least attempt to see if their is a fix if there is an issue which previously I wouldn't.  Well I would but I have learned several things over time about symbol links going missing and how to sort them and that amending one or two files may be enough to save you having to totally reinstall the distribution.

As I have said before the reason why I use an Arch system over a Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora system is the applications are in a much more central location on Arch.  On the others you normally need to keep adding PPAs and pointing the distros to file servers you have no idea whether they are safe or not.

Admittedly several scripts at the AUR may not work so I'm not saying it's perfect but nine times out of ten I can get the programs I want either from the central repositories of  the distribution I'm using or the AUR.

Do they move their mirrors and files.  They probably do but that is sent with the updates normally so I don't have to manually enter the movements.

Obviously I understand that if I was running a server I would want a machine that I set up once and  then hopefully only have to do occasional updates the likes of Debian/Fedora are commonly used and I respect that.  If I was to setup a central server then I would be looking at them but I don't have a server need.

As a desktop user I like to install programs try them, love them or hate them, keep them or remove them so I need a pretty dynamic setup.  Hence why the Arch system suits me.

However I have discovered once I find something I like I will tend to stick with it.  For example my usage of Shutter to grab screenshots.  Sure there is Flameshot and Greenshot and probably others but they don't always manage to grab game shots very well which I normally can get Shutter to do.

Shutter hasn't been updated in a long time and getting it to build on various distros can be a long trek but Archman for example made sure it built without stopping by building the libraries in the right order which Manjaro could not do.

Maybe it's because Archman is using Mate where as when I was running Manjaro it was KDE.  Given Shutter is primarily based in Gnome and Perl maybe Mate just knows how to deal with it better as it's based on the Gnome system.  I don't know you see for all I am quite technically minded.

When it comes to complex programming my brain has decided it just doesn't want to get involved.  I tried programming many years ago and discovered it was not for me.  I just don't have the patience to find a missing semicolon or symbol in a several thousand lines of code program.  

As much as I like to investigate programs I really don't have the patience to sit and learn programs that are incredibly complex either.  I know Blender is an incredible tool and as well as being a 3D modelling software is capable of  producing animation and some even use it for video production.

I have sat and rendered a model from example files and sat and waited for several hours for what turns out to be a two minute animation.  Yes it's impressive but to be honest I know in my heart I would not sit and do such.

I love Emulation.  It fascinates me seeing a machine running on my PC which was never meant to.  Being able to try out programs and games I never could.

For example MAME includes MESS so it can run several computer systems as well as arcade games so I was able to play with Irix as there is now SGI Emulation in there.  It's far from perfect and obviously not a huge amount of stuff is widely available to download for it.

However I have always wanted to see the Irix system in action and unless I was willing to pay the silly amounts asked on eBay for machines such the Octane and the Indigo.  This is the only way I will get to try out such.

Hence why I now have Previous on most of my setups.  It's an Emulation of  the Next Systems so I can play with NextStep.  Once again software is pretty limited and getting some of the stuff to work is a bit of a challenge.  However seeing it and how you can see Mac OS X has integrated many of its features and improved makes it fascinating to me.

It never ceases to amaze me how the emulator programmers keep getting things working.  I wouldn't know where the hell to start.  Seeing them get things like Yusu, Xenia and Citra which are running emulation of Switch, Xbox 360 and 3DS games respectively.  OK they are not perfect but the fact they have done so just proves how incredibly dedicated these people are.

I have always said my ideal desktop operating system which would never be possible.  Is a machine where I can run Linux, Windows, Mac, Amiga, Next, BeOS and more from one desktop with one simple double click.  Integrated Emulation at desktop level.  Integration between clipboards and software.  It's very idyllic and would never happen as the companies responsible for said technology would vehemently prevent such.  But hey a man can dream.  Either that or I'm just lazy and want everything under one roof to save me leg work.

Anyway I think that's enough waffle for this episode.  So until next time ...take care.