Hello dear people, hope you are all in a good shape and mood despite the winter and the world madness! No matter what art and joy of creating such should always evoke to ones spirit to the best possible.

     Here it is some updates over the character, mostly wips with semi look dev renders in order to see how the finalized dyna mesh looks like and most importantly to determine the tickness of the mesh by checking  shapes due to the SSS shading. Since I was pretty satisfied with what was achievet at those first sculpting stages the tool limit pushed me to move to the next stage. Creating the actual cage for both rigging and further sculpting. The cage would give me more freedom to push the character mesh shapes to their final outlook and to apply general details such as pores, wrinkles and so on onto the body. On the other hand it will give the rigging department something solid to work on. This is why rendering those turntables above was important part of the process. Having and active blend shape facial pose and a basic A pose including facial expression being at its optimum relax would give better idea of where things are and where they might go right or wrong!

 I have used Renderman for the render process and I intend to keep the engine as major development tool till the end of the project.

Thanks for tuning in and hopefully I will have more to share asap.

      Cheers!

      Hello good people, hope you are in good health and if not I hope you will be in such sooner! Here are some updates towards the character. My main goal in those wips was to properly block the shape out of the initial desighns I did. We all know the frustration where people feel when 3d work has to represent the 2d scetches, turnaround sheets and concepts. Since the dawn of cgi industry there are huge gaps between those and despite the progression and the development of tools there are always common miss understandings what should it be. What about you, have you ever heard a concept artist being dissapointed with the outlook of his/her work being cheaply destroyed by the 3d artist :)? My personal experience have shown me for the last couple of years there are many stellar artists out there who provide amazing work and using the techniques of modern softwares they achieve the proper outlook that was once set from the concepts and drawings. Unfortunatelly I did not have the time for some colorfull concepts of this character however I managed to define its shapes and looks in the turnaround sheets in order to have at least some basis to step on. Anyway, some fast scetches with pastells and inks might come at some point wheter or not the character is alredy in dev stage. 

   Moreover I wanted to "prove" the A pose by blocking out fast plastic anatomy pose of the character being in four legs (quadrupped). The major idea of this character is to be able maintain position both two legs and four legs. In that regard SideFX are getting closer to provide users with great kinefx system able to do that and have no patience to get to that point, however before thinging of rigging I need to fulfill some major steps, fundamenta to the character to work properly. Here are the processes this character needs:

1. Polishing the major A pose definig better the forms and shapes it has. For reference I learn from one of the best and available to people artists Kris Costa and his teaching platform Fly on the Wall (https://www.flyonthewall.studio/) His techniques and well explain processes help me to understand better what and how should I do it. Despite my character is far from realistic and I have never been fond of realism, never fall into that super realistic look of things I dug out into different direction and that is to make it believable. Lets just name it for now as stylized realism ;)

2. Making the cage. This is the next and very important step to me. I have decided to dug out deeper and instead of jumping into direct retopology I did research and found out I need to plan things very well. In that regard I need to understand how topology for animation should be done and then I will try to apply those techniques and rules to my character here. It is a vast topic and a nohow that none of the cources out there could provide because it needs experience that mostly skilled people in the industry actually have... Unfortunately it is not anything like "Hey, lets make an awesome ocean wave splashing like crazy or make a rock to explode and jump into the awesome Rebelway artists for cool tech stuff to learn from. Topology for animation is different beer and here are some of the gems I found myself so far:

                         https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-art-of-moving-points/id639498241 - great book I am unable to find for selling and I do not have an ipad but yeah, this is probably the closest to what I need for my task. I found some low quality pages here but it is almost imbarable to read from https://www.scribd.com/document/490985023/The-Art-Of-Moving-Points

                         https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1218697/FULLTEXT01.pdf Mans Makinen provides his wonderfull degree project I can learn from as well. It gives me good basis to think of and probably use.

                         https://www.youtube.com/@dewdiehard2416 Dew Deihard well respected from many in the industry has scratched the surface with the next level in depth knowledge over the topic. Unfortunatelly he decided to keep silent for some time despite the interest of people to support his work and at least publish something well packed in gumroad. I hope he will return with more!

                         https://www.chrisj.com.au/p/about.html one of the legends in the industry. No need to explain, he is 3d guru to me

       Those few sources should be enough for me to further push the character. The very first source would contribute in a great favor but yeah... Sadly, I do not have access to it for now

3.After the cage is done two major things can be made simutaneously

           a: Deliver the cage for proxy rig. That would be simple rig even without facial structure. It will help define the character poses, how it would move and IF the A pose is correct for sure. Unlike in 2d animation 3d characters can't be livable right from the start. One of the advantages of 2d animation has been the ability to animate the character pretty soon after its design was made and to see if it kind of desintegrates in certain poses. If that happens changes to the desighns might be considered for a change or animation style could be changed as well. Many options... In 3d animation we mostly work with digital puppets. This is why the prove of A pose is crucial!

           b: Next step final sculpting with the actual cage can be done. Level after level of detail can be added here defining the character final look by implying mostly bumps and figuring out its looks. All these procesess are well explained by Kris

           There are next steps after those three but I will leave that for hopefully when it gets there. Thanks for tuning in and wish you all good health and tons of inspiration in your works! Cheers, Sova!

Hello, people! At the upcoming and very first of my blog post I will upload whenever possible the progress of a character I am gradually developing for the idea of making it "alive". The idea is to follow the current cgi industry standards mixed with various techniques and starting from the very basic and fundamental techniques as fas I am familiar with. It is going to be animation character with a potential of being the face representative of a local studio and probably make it see brighther days where the character will be placed at an environment and render out either still images or a clip following certain concept whether there is actuall story or not. Here is why I have decided to open a blog and gradually following the character progression as well as unnoficially cover the new lawfully established copyrights rules for an artist ownerships whether or not being involved in teamwork, commerciall or personal, inhouse or outsource the art an individual provide does have different measures but what is yours is yours and its origins belongs only to its creator/creators . In that regard in the upcoming blog posts and if the character reaches to that point of its development we will not only follow the artistic and technicall challanges but the copyright process, registracion and license of it. At times of more and more growing demand for automatisation, rescourse starvation, what art is considered to be and what it is not as well as the newly AI appereance on the marketplace being considered not only a tool but an actuall contributor by many it is more important than ever for an individual to insist clarify and protect its own work and collaboration. So before contacting a layer, paying unknown amount of money licensing and registering any king of artistic form you might have done the very first and fundamental step is to actually share it with the rest of the world, either in your class, work, personal pages, personal mails, blogs... Neverming how confusing this might sounds, this is how it works and yes it wont protect it but it will give the artist a solid ground to step on regarding the next steps needed to be done legally and officially. So lets see if this character will even reach to this part of its journey, will it worth the efforts, will it actually live that far? Thank to those being interested and see you around! Sincerelly yours, SovaAnima!