myshu

GiFriday #31 (Guns for Hire 2)

Continuing from last week, here's some Red Team test GIFs, created from Synnesai's wonderful designs.

Grif:

Simmons:

Donut:

2017-06-30 18:54:04 +0000 UTC View Post

WIP 170628

It's almost July! A few things coming up and going down:

I'm going to RTX! I drive out to Austin on July 4th, and will be returning home the 11th. During that time I may not be available to answer messages (but I'll do my best!) If you're attending the con and happen to stop by the signature hall, you can say hi! I'll be working with the other Guardians and wearing moogle ears, as I usually do.

To pay for the trip (and bef...

GiFriday #30 (Guns for Hire 1)

The video above is a collab project between Synnesai, Sam Newmark and myself! I did the models and animation and Synne and Sam rocked the rest. Both are top-notch people and very talented! Synne has a Patreon you guys should check out, to boot. ;)

So, the GIFs for this Friday are some tests I did with Synne's designs. We'll start with Blue Team!

2017-06-23 19:16:11 +0000 UTC View Post

r[E]volution Ch. 9, p. 9-11

Learned this week(s):
Material/Object index passes (masking), node frames, shrinkwrap modifier, edge split modifier, trick: post-processing specular bevels, discovery: Cycles solved Z/Alpha issue - IF ONLY Blender's Cycles would properly support billboard particles, we'd be on a roll...

RIP jeep, eh?

May sketches! And an announcement!

Attached are the sketches for May. If you're a $10 patron and you missed your sketch, catch up with me! I'll take care of ya.

* IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT *

This coming September will make a whole year of Patreon support. You guys are really rad, and I've appreciated every day y'all have backed my artwork.

That said, starting September, there will be big changes to this account. The $10 reward tier is being removed. That means this June, July and Augus...

r[E]volution Ch. 9, p. 6-8

"Myshu you took a whole month to make three pages" yeah, I know. May's been a month full of experiments. Chupathingys always seem to be my favorite test subjects for new tech, and as the previous WIP posts might show, I picked up a lot of new tricks in Blender while working on this update. I didn't get to keep *everything* I learned (soft AO cel shading  is not really feasible with ...

WIP 170515

Learned this week:

Flood filling vertex paint (shift+K); mist render pass, grouping nodes (ctrl+g, tab); "rough" cell shading (AO + shadow pass); constrained angles for knife tool (K, C); mask modifier

I think... I'm done... experimenting with the compositor for a while.

...Let's, uh, move on.

WIP 170508

Learned this week:
Auto-smooth normals, ivy gen add-on (vines), particle instance modifier, screw modifier, array modifier, particle systems following a path

This render took ten minutes (and I can see five mistakes right away.) It's definitely the most complex raw render I've ever made for a comic. I'd have more to say about it, but I have to fly out the door!

'til next time~

April Sketches!

Happy May, y'all~

Attached are the sketch requests from April! My $10 patrons are free to send me their requests for May. I hope everyone's having a terrific spring so far! It's been unseasonably chilly in Texas, but I sure as hell won't complain.

Thank you guys again, for both supporting me and being patient while I learn new animation tricks and try to squeeze out comics. This month I'll be showing y'all a new video and a comic update, so look out for Blue Team shenanigans and somethin...

WIP 170424

Learned this week: OpenGL rendering (see above!), armature rigging shenanigans

Apologies for the lack of updates! I have been doing a bunch of stuff in the meantime. Just this morning I rigged a big kitty:

 I still make daily updates on Twitter (such as this! ) They don't always have pictures attached, but the log keeps me...

Chapter Nine Begins!

Learned this past week: stencil textures, mask brushes, boolean modifier, spot lamp shenanigans.

I am fully aware of the irony behind spending twice as long as usual to produce a comic update during a month I set out to optimize my workflow. I mean... I couldn't stop experimenting. Some of it turned out neat! That cover page, for instance, is 98% Blender: all the objects and textures, and most of the lighting. The built-in texture painter really saved my ass. Took a lot of time to figure out, ...

March Sketches!

2017 is rolling right along~

In comic news, the start of chapter nine is coming right up, I promise. I've been painting the renders this weekend so that it'll be ready by Monday. It'll be fun timing, since season 15 of RvB is starting tomorrow. I'm excited!

Just a reminder to my $10 patrons: you can send me your sketch requests any time! I'll be getting started on the April batch as soon as the comic update is out.

WIP 170324

Learned this week: painting tiled textures, linking materials (ctrl+L), recording audio/video with a synced frame-rate

The tiled texture thing was a bit of a mind-blower. I'd been using a really clumsy cloning/mirroring method in my sprite editor for years, but then I happened to stumble over the fact that Blender's texture painter has a feature to accomplish the same thing with 20x less fuss. So damn handy. At this rate, it might get to a point where I literally do *everything* in that progra...

GiFriday #29

It's been a slow week, and I feel the need to apologize. To make up for comics running late, here's a gif of a shrine maiden (her name is Lily!) You'll meet her in the next update.

I talk more about shrine maidens here, if you're curious! 

WIP 170310

Learned this week in Blender: the skin modifier, objects/groups in place of hair particles, the ctrl+shift+o shortcut and data removal, vertex painting, "connected" proportional editing and limited dissolve.

Jumped back into the internal engine to get this render out for the first page of chapter 9. I'd like to get better at building sets inside of Blender, so there's less to paint when I bring the panels into Manga Studio. This is a decent attempt, so I'll keep trying.

WIP 170303

Heya amigos~

This week I've been drawing more concepts for the next animation. Birds are cool too, right?

In chupa news, I wrote out the first scene of chapter 9 and drew thumbnails for that scene and the cover page. This weekend I'll be jumping back into Blender to build sets, and before long I should be able to start rendering pages.

Hope everyone's having a good March so far!

February Sketches!

It's already March? Phew. Attached are the sketch requests from February! Had some romantic pairs in the bunch, which made for fun practice drawing couples.

WIP 170224

My latest RvB animation, "Sister Escapes," is now up for the public!  Thanks again to you guys for the support. :)

This week I got wrapped up in a private commission for someone at my work, but also took care of a bunch of sketches for my $10 amigos. In the mornings I'm working on my next video project, starting with some concept art. Animals are still cool, right?

New Animation! "Sister Escapes"

Learned this week: the particle info node. And Cycle's lack of support for line and halo particles! Oh well, there's always a work-around.

Also learned a bit about outsourcing. Cheers to OroborosNZ (and Thesauri!) for the assist with rendering.

Anyway, it's done! Wooooooooooo~
This is now my first Patreon-supported video--that's you guys! Thank you guys so much! Y'all kick ass.

As promised, my patrons get to see this video a week earlier than everyone else, and the public releas...

Animation WIP 170210

Learned this week: nothing solid, just the many nuances of shape keys.

Facial animations are d-o-n-e, so I can move on to the final touches, effects and backgrounds. Yeah, not much to say in technical updates, but I did find something in the old story log!

Here's a conversation I had over IRC around the time I was writing chapter three of the comic (pages 16  2017-02-10 18:54:51 +0000 UTC View Post

Animation WIP 170203

Learned this week: AV-sync playback mode and pose libraries.

Like the grease pencil, pose libraries are something I already knew about but didn't try to implement before now. I finally tried it because I was becoming hyper-aware of certain poses/bone positions I was using over and over, and wouldn't it be handy to simply have them keyed up within two clicks, instead of posing each bone individually?? So yeah, did that.
On a related note, I finally hit on a (slightly) better solution to thei...

Happy February 2017!

...and happy Lunar New Year! Attached are the sketch requests for January, including this proud cock. I checked my Chinese horoscope, and it said my year is going to be kind of bleh. I guess I just have to work hard, y'know?

Thanks to my patrons for being cool people (love y'all!), and here's a reminder to my $10 peeps to message me their requests for this month. If you are on this reward tier and are interested in using up some extra months' worth of sketches for a larger commission,...

Animation WIP 170127

Learned this week: Blender's Grease Pencil.

Gettin' to the end of the month, and doesn't look like I'll finish this project by then. Oh well, still a learning experience. For the past week I've focused especially on my workflow and ways to make it faster, so that fills me with optimism for the next project. One thing I picked up that I wish I'd tried sooner is the grease pencil: a feature of Blender's I've known about since the start, but never seriously toyed with since it doesn't have a dire...

Animation WIP 170118

Learned this week: the " . " key.

...Yeah, sometimes it's the little things.

A cat (not Jenny! The baby!cat) ripped two keys off my laptop's numpad, and if you use Blender, you might know those are camera hotkeys. When crazy glue didn't solve my problem, I bought a $10 USB keyboard from WalMart and layed the whole thing on top. Functional solution?

Status on the video: I've finished blocking all the shots and keying the lip-syncing. Now it's just 5,000 more frames of armature anima...

Animation WIP 170109

Something I learned about this past week: dependency cycles! (Spoiler: they're a bad thing.)

In the last WIP I talked about my project's conversion to Cycles, although I left one thing out: I'm still rendering the backgrounds in the internal engine. At this point I know *how* (mostly) to rebuild all the canyon set's shaders for Cycles, but I decided that it was too much work for this single project, considering it's already taking longer than I expected (don't they always?) This crappy box can...

Happy January 2017!

(I'm sure y'all are tired of being told "Happy New Year," so I mixed it up.)

Attached are the sketch request rewards for November and December. Thanks again to my $10 patrons for being super-cool and supportive as well as giving me interesting subjects to tackle. Since I started this Patreon account the sketches have been all over the place in style and quality/quantity/etc, and it's gotten a little prickly at times, trying to make a system that's fair to everyone. That's nobody's fault! Excep...

Animation WIP 122816

Fun fact: chupathingys turn six years old this month. This was the very first concept drawing , which I posted on my Rooster Teeth profile on December 10th, 2010.

For our December 2016 shenanigans, I've finally made the leap to Blender's Cycles render engine. Compared to the internal render engine, Cycles is designed to turn out more photo-realistic renders with better lighting, shading, etc. One of its...

Animation WIP 122016

I made a journal on Rooster Teeth mentioning my progress on this , but I wanted to share a screenshot with you guys! New video's coming along well so far.

Fun fact, though: Blender Internal doesn't apply "mist" effects to billboard objects. Annoying! I'll have to paint that by hand.

GiFriday #28

(Continued from my series of journals on Rooster Teeth) here's a GiFriday, featuring everyone's favorite yellow soldier: Sister! Been a while since I built a new chupa model (or made a gif!) so that was refreshing.

...look't those bouncy bits.

Happy December!

Hi guys, it's a new month! I want to thank all my patrons for their support and comments. You guys rock!

And you, stranger reading this off the street--you're probably cool, too.

I've attached the $10 sketches for September and October as... collages? I'm not sure "collage" is the right word. Anyway! I'm still missing November requests, so I'll post that after everyone's caught up.

As y'all saw in the last post, we finished chapter eight of the comic! Woo. So, what's next: I'm doin...