Debating working on my Blender assignment early just so that I can get it out of the way and avoid a potential case like last week where I get into a little bit of a time crunch. I guess I could look and see what my assignment is supposed to look like...

Oh wow this is the last one before my final. That's both relieving and also terrifying

Oh my fucking god they're literally asking me to do Wiz I can't make this up someone give me a link to a person who can do a 3 sided ref right fucking now

Oh my god they're just saying "make Weez"

WELP the artist that did my ref sheet has offered to do the side view as well, so I guess we're actually doing this

So yeah this is what I have to do. I have to make Wiz, rig him, and then make 3 animations with him. One with him just standing there like a jackass, one with him walking or running, and then one with him doing whatever Wiz does. Probably either something cute or something stupid

Here's Wiz's skeleton. I decided to give him 5 fingers like normal so that he can move them around and do stuff like that, but I don't think he needs more than 1 bone in his feet. What's he gonna do, wiggle his toes? Either way, him being an anthro character helps a lot

Well I got feedback on Wiz for Blender, but there's too much to screenshot on my phone! Overall he approves, but thinks it may be a bit too much to tackle with how I have him now. Things like simplifying the hands, reducing armor pieces, and not doing fur are recommended

So essentially I'm gonna make cursed Wiz, and then see if I can't uncurse him either in the future, or with any extra time may have, which is a solid idea. I'll have to start working on his mesh then in the coming days

Here's the full feedback that I got on the character submission. He's basically just telling me "hell yeah but maybe start simpler"

So yes, I'm starting work on the mesh for Wiz. My process is going to be to make a stillborn Wiz, then make it a little bit less stillborn repeatedly until I'm happy with how he looks

Anyways, jokes aside (for now), we've got a head and shoulders. I'm working on the chest plate now, then I'll do the arms, and then the legs. After that it's all just refining the mesh until I'm happy

I'm gonna have nightmares

Alright he has legs now. Horrible, deformed, burn victim legs, but legs nonetheless. Lemme try and refine these just a LITTLE before moving onto the arms and hands

You can see 2 issues I'm having right now. The head is actually pretty good for now, but the neck is too long, body is at the wrong angle, and waist is too low, so I need to stretch those back into place

*bonk*

ok progress! I need to work more on the legs and chest, but the proportions seem to be ok now

Thighs are emerging from the blob, but they're at the wrong angle, and too low. His waist is also WAAAAAAAAAAAY too big.

The issue is that i've bene kinda looking at this as a human character, but it isn't. Wiz has abnormally long legs, no real hips, and thicker shins. I need to think about this more in terms of Wiz himself, not a person

Wow that last post was a grammatical nightmare, but the thighs seem to be better now. I'm at that point where it looks just "off". I wish Blender had a way to just select parts and move them in or out

NOW I think I'm getting somewhere

Alright it's time to get the ref walls set up. Turns out that my thighs are not NEARLY big enough, and the shoulders are too high. Hopefully now I can get this dialed

ok wow Wiz is a lot more BUILT than I thought he was. Looks like I'm reprofiling and smoothing again. This guy would KILL me

Ok yeah this is looking actually good now

HOT DAMN let's give him some arms now

About time I shitpost again so here have some nightmares

Ooooooooooooooooooo!

Now actually time to get to work on his arms

Fingers are the spawn of fucking satan I tell you

TOOK ME OVER AN H O U R FOR THESE

Here's where I'm stopping for the night. Something still feels a bit "off" with the character as it is. Not sure what it is. Maybe the torso is too long? idk I'm tired

I couldn't just quit. nono, I had to do the changes. Hey, i think I was right! This looks a lot better

Added his thigh screens but I've been warned not to go too fine on the details until I remesh the character. A lot of them will likely be lost in the process, so I need to do that BEFORE adding in finr stuff. On tap for tonight though are his feet and his arms. Still not happy

You can also see a lot of the ripples and whatnot in the mesh, which don't look great. Thankfully, most of the character is either completely matte, fuzzy, or a near-mirror finish, so those fine ripples shouldn't show up much at all in the final product

Remeshing now and Wiz is gaining power

Same as it ever was

I think I'm gonna not worry about remeshing at the moment, especially since I need to work on the hands and arms more. However, all of the reference images I've found are either explicit or total shitposts like this

Now how in the hell did I make his thighs small again. Dammit. I should be able to just grab and stretch his waist up. The good thing is that his torso is still a bit too tall, so this needed to happen anyways

Anyone else notice that Wiz is a lil tubby?

I think this is the final mesh. It's not perfect, and it's not complete, but it's good enough for the project, so I'm gonna run with it

jk he needs a tail too. This one sucks ass but I don't care enough to fix it right now. I'm getting frustrated and I'm tired, so I'm gonna call it a night

I've been tweaking around his proportions and HOLY SHIT WE'RE GETTING CLOSE NOW. Hands are still weird, ears need a little help, and the tail is still atrocious, but HOT DAMN we're doing pretty good tonight! MCUH better than last night

FINALLY figured out the issue with the arms. They look great now, but I think they might be a bit small? Maybe they need to be scaled up slightly to match the proportions of the rest of the character

Thoughts?

OH

This was meant to be a shitpost but it turned out kinda cute

Tweaked his hands and yeah. There's literally nothing else I wanna touch on this besides the tail now. There are 2 features he's missing, but I dunno if I wanna add them. I'll save and try it for funsies

They are...

His thigh handles

His shoulder pads

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I just realized how powerful this model of Wiz is

Well I have reached my stopping point for the night. Blender doesn't wanna let me connect either side of the handles, and apparently it's a bit of a pain in the ass to do so, so I'll tackle that tomorrow or Friday. Regardless, GREAT progress today. Absolutely thrilled

Got tired of him having very sublt differences from side to side from the small tweaks I've had to make without mirroring on, so I deleted half of him and I'll mirror it across once I'm done with the thigh handles and maybe the shoulder pads

Ok yeah this looks pretty solid. It doesn't mesh well with the model since this was done in edit mode whereas the rest was sculpted, but hopefully I can fix that soon enough. I will need to do a little more profiling though on the leg to make it all work, but I'm very happy!

ok this went south FAST. Messed up the mesh bad, then didn't have a backup made, so I had to recover and do all this shit, but now we're back to where we started, so I can try to do this again, except properly

Tail and shoulder pads are the only things that are left now. The rest of the mesh is finished

The tail looks pretty good with a lot more roughening, but I don't think this is gonna animate well, so I might have to go bland and boring for this since animating his puffball would be RIDICULOUSLY hard. Also noticing that I need to do more work on his thigh screens

Much better

And here's his tail. Doesn't look like much cuz there's no fluff, but you bet your ass this is becoming a giant puffball soon

Really tempted to just not do the shoulder pads. It's such a complex, hard to model shape, and it's at an angle that is quite challenging to work with on the model, since Wiz is in a T-pose. I'll see what I can do. Gonna shower though for now

WELL I DID EM. I'm not sure if I did them well, but I did them nonetheless. Please do give me feedback on these. If you like them, don't like them, think that parts need to be tweaked, etc. I want this model to be as good as possible

Here's the full model after some smoothing. I think this might be it. This is the mesh. This is Wiz. Anyone have tweak ideas? I think maybe the elbow should be a little lower, but I dunno

I will also go over the entire thing and try and smooth it out as much as possible, though it won't really matter in the end since most of this is gonna be either fur or metal, which won't show the ripples much at all

Yeah I'm messing around with colors to see if they will show the ripples, and nope. They're all but invisible once you go to a rendered view with materials

Aaaaaaaaand to cap off tonight, I sent an email to my professor showing the progress I've made on Wiz so far, and to ask if he has any advice or guidance moving forward. The mesh is pretty much done now, so I'll have to switch gears to UV unwrapping tomorrow

It was recommended that I put Wiz into a tpose before rigging, so I'm moving his arms back to where they were and fixing the mesh so that it looks right again. Shouldn't take too long. The rest of the model is done and ready to be textured and mapped

Cool I get the shoulder pad done and look over to the other side to make sure that the mirroring utility didn't do something stupid like fuck up the entire mesh-

Stupid Blender. Fixed the issue now. Doing final checks before exporting this to make a low poly version, and then it's time for UV unwrapping

Aaaaaaaaaaaaand there we go! This is the completed mesh of Wiz, so now I need to export this and make him low poly so that my computer doesn't kill itself trying to animate this. I have a feeling though that his fur is gonna do that tho

The remesher seems to see some seams where I mirrored the character, so I might have to go in and iron those out if it throws a fit

Something is very not right here. Let me try Blender's built in tool.

Wow Blender's own tool is SO much better. I've dropped his poly count from nearly 800K faces to only 372K, which should be much easier for my computer to manage. His thigh handles do have a couple of booboos, so I'll try to clean those up, but all in all I'm VERY happy

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand perfect! It looks almost as good as it did before remeshing, and it's under HALF the amount of faces I started with. Now it's actually finally time to move on

FUZZY

Petition to replace Christ the Redeemer with

W I Z

Jokes aside, I need to actually get this UV mapped and figured out before I can do anything like this. I need to break the mesh into different chunks so that I can assign different qualities to them depending upon what part is supposed to look like what. Having a hard time rn lol

This is going catastrophically bad but I think I have a way to make this work

So what is so bad about this? Well, you can see it. The colors are there, but the texturing is completely off, there's weird specs all over the place, and it's overall just a very poor map of what the character is supposed to look like. Why is that? Well, it's pretty simple

Blender, as well as nearly all 3d modelling programs operate on a UV basis, IE what your model would look like if you "unfolded" it and laid it flat. This means that every model will have a UV map of some kind, otherwise it can't be painted and textured properly. This is no good!

Now it doesn't take a genius to realize that Wiz's UV map is, well, atrocious. There are tons of separated parts, weird edges, and whatever else, which is why painting him is a nightmare! However, creating a custom map for him is EXTREMELY hard with the mesh style I used

So, instead of trying to just remesh him into quads and then try and fight the unwrapping utility, I'm going to go over the whole thing and make my own mesh that isn't turded up using a plugin called RetopoFlow. This should make a very nice geometric model of Wiz

From there, I should be able to simply make a UV map using cuts and slices, which will allow me to PROPERLY paint and texturize the character, instead of the mess you see a few tweets up. It's just gonna take more time

Progress is slow, but steady. Currently at 1,920 faces, which is far astronomically lower than the 373,000 faces the old mesh was at. MAYBE I'll be done with this today and I can start unwrapping tomorrow? Not sure but it's a grind for sure

Yay upper body is done. Time to move onto the lower body

I am so sick of looking at this mesh but thankfully all that is left to do now are his feet. Shouldn't be hard to do them either, at least compared to the HELLSCAPE that was his handles

FINALLY

Here are the 2 models next to each other. I should be able to compensate for the lacking detail with the texture map. Which, speaking of, we need to look at now so I can actually PROGRESS in this assignment

TIL Blender has sharps and whatnot which can make details stick out like they're supposed to. H Y P E D

Ok wow I'm legitimately getting excited again about this. The details are coming back and are looking SO GOOD

Keep in mind, this model is over 50 TIMES SIMPLER than the one I had before, and yet may end up having the SAME amount of detail. This is why we optimize in Blender

These are looking ok, but the mesh underneath is quite messy, so I might revisit these a bit and try to clean them up

Ok wow yeah this is great! I do need to do a little work on his thighs though, so I'll fix that, and then it's finally time to start work on getting him to look like Wiz

Finally, after days of continuous work, we have the final mesh of Wiz. He is done. Now I need to figure out how to unfold him so I can paint him... for real

Been cutting seams for a little. What you're looking at is that UV map I was talking about before. The color coding there is showing stretch, or how much parts are being deformed to become flat. Everything should be a deep blue color, so I've got a ways to go haha

There's a lotta seams now but hey, it's pretty much all blue now. There is some slight distortion, but it's near impossible to get everything to be completely flat on an organic model like this

UH OH

As TANTALIZINGLY GOOD as this is, I still need to make it better. Not only do I need to mirror the UV, but I also need to add MORE SEAMS in for any difference in color, such as for the side screen there on his head. It makes for a nice, crisp line, like you see on the rest of him

However, THIS IS STILL A GOOD PROOF OF CONCEPT. The mapping for the visor geometry, seam placement, and whatever else seems to be good, so I don't think I have to move or change any of them; I just need to add more of them to make Wiz EVEN BETTER

OOPS I MADE HIM FUZZY KINDA

Today I also learned that Blender can align vertices to a given axis. This is going to look astronomically good when I'm done here holy SHIT

I'm actually gonna cry

It is bed time, but I thought I would share the pinnacle of my lifetime

This is looking GREAT, and I've gotten all 3 screens taken care of now (head, shoulder, leg), but these handles are still bugging me, along with their pretty terrible seam map and mesh geometry. It's such a small detail, but I'm gonna try and remake them better. Might scrap tho

Smooth Wiz is compelling. Also realizing I should probably do something about the vertexes on his thigh there, but eh smoothing takes care of it and I'm still under 8K vertices

ok I made the right call again. All I gotta do is sort that massive N-gon out and we're perfect

Gotta say that moving vertexes in here is a bit of a nightmare hah. I should probably hide the other side of the mesh since I'm gonna mirror this anyways once I'm done

Yeah this was the right call. Time to do the rear one and then clean stuff up. After that though, I might actually finally be done feature creeping this and move on to painting and texturing

Yeah this was absolutely worth the extra time. Time to mirror, do a test unwrap to make sure the seams are good, format the mesh, and then get to painting and texturing; everyone's favorite part

GUESS WHAT TIME IT IS FOR REAL NOW

Too lazy to put seams in for the little panel thingy, but I'm also too lazy to repaint the whole thing because of this, so I'm gonna mask off the leg and paint the vertices themselves. Should work out fine

Really getting there for reals omg

There are still 2 very big issues that I need to sort out. One being his shoulder screen showing the Commodore logo, and the other being his thighs fanning out the colors. This is a pain for me mainly because I don't really have any real art programs, but I can try it in Paint

Oh also the circuit patterns on his legs. Would be nice to have those

Crotch plate is now plate-y instead of just being a solid chunk of black metal

VERY NEARLY DONE NOW. Just need to do those 3 things still. circuit pattern, thigh rainbow, and shoulder screen. After that, we're done!

Hmmmmm not the worst but I can do better. I need to export this image to another program and work on it there

Hard to tell what this will look like but if I did my math right it should look pretty correct?

WOWOWOWOWOWOW IT DOES OK MIRRORING THIS

HAHAHAHAH I EVEN GOT HIS I/O PANEL

FUCK

YES

a a a a a a a

Only need to do the leg rainbow now

It's being a pain in the ass as per usual, but I've finally got them aligned right, so all I gotta do is fight to make the pattern and then the fade

MIRROR TIME

YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS WE ARE DONE PAINTING

Well, not quite. Some friends pointed out that his expression is a little... off. I think the eyes are too small and too far up, and the mouth is also too high. Lemme tweak it a bit and see what I come up with

Fixed the facial expression. HE IS SO CUTE HEAD ON OMFG I'M GONNA DIE LOOK AT HIM

Aaaaaaaaand here he is! Painting is now 100% done, so now we can go on and make him reflective in certain parts, matte in other, and give him some overall texture that isn't "wow he's sculpted out of clay"

Ooooooooooooooooooooo shiny

Brace yourselves cuz it's only going up from here

If you've ever felt the textured plastic/paint of an old computer... yeah

Painted titanium chestplate is now painted and... titanium

And I'm gonna call it quits here tonight. I've got all synthetic parts mapped out and textured, so the only thing left to do before moving on to rigging is make his fur look right. It should be longer and floofier, but that requires grooming, which I haven't done before

I will actually probably take tomorrow off from this assignment, not only because I've been working on this nonstop for like a fucking WEEK, but also because I have other assignments that I need to get done before this one, as well as work, etc etc

Shower and bed time. Here's the final render for the night. This is turning out better than even my wildest dreams had envisioned

You ok there Wiz?

To hell with breaks I'm rigging this asshole

Yeah so as you can see, the model isn't *quite* linked properly. Joints move in odd directions, and there's no limit to his motion, which is obviously not what we want. I'll need to research this more, but I need to get to work so it'll have to wait

mfw Macintosh

Off to work I go

Hey babe do those legs go all the way up?

Last one before I go and actually fix this. I'm cackling like a 4 year old

What's interesting is that the map appears to be at least MOSTLY ok if I ignore the rig, which I think I will just because I'm used to doing it this way. There are some issues though that still need to be worked out, particularly with parts of the body moving then they shouldn't

MMMMMMMMMMMM

I DIDN'T EVEN TRY TO DO THIS ONE OH GOD

Here's a good example of what the big issue with this is at the moment. Moving JUST the head bone does cause the head to move, but it leaves part of the ear behind as well as takes part of the chestplate with it. Why is this? Well, it's down to something called weight painting

This is weight paint mode. In laymen's terms, it highlights what parts of the mesh will follow other parts, such as the bones, or with particle effects, like the fur I was playing with yesterday. This is the map for the head bone, and you can see how it's not properly mapped

Took me WAY TOO LONG to figure this out, but now his head is moving like it should, though this is currently the max angle before clipping issues appear on his neck, so I think I need to tweak the weights a *little* more

Fixed the whole "hair not following the head" issue and it turns out that this is pretty much a non-issue. The fluff hides the weirdness perfectly, so there's no need to really pay much attention to it. Time to paint EVERY OTHER BONE in this guy's body. More

I cannot preach to you how satisfying watching your character come to life in real time is. He heard you talkin some shit about Amigas

Kinda at a weird spot now. I can either

paint the rest of the bones

or

fur the rest of the bones

tempted to fur as it might make weight painting less tedious since it'll hide flaws. That could be a bad thing tho. I can just hide the fur so meh. I guess I'll fur him

Took a break but we're now furred- AND FUCK I FORGOT THE STUPID TAIL AGAIN

You know honestly I've debated just completely removing Wiz's tail from the character. It does nothing for his design, but eh gotta keep it furry

There we go, now Wiz has a big ass uniform puffball on his ass. I need to learn how to groom the fur so that I can actually make this look like a tail, as well as make the fur on his head a bit longer than it is now. The arms, tummy, and legs though are about right as they sit

Hmmmmmmm I'm pretty bad at grooming it seems

Hey though the legs are looking pretty nice. Need to comb a bit more, but I'm pretty happy with this as-is

TUMMY TIME

The model is, officially, 100%, absolutely, totally, D O N E. All that is left now is to finish rigging and get to animating. I am so, so happy, and I can't wait to move him out of the t-pose position and into a more natural one

Yeah if any of you thought I was *actually* taking a break and wasn't continuing on like normal, you'd be mistaken. Wiz is now fully rigged, but with 1 kinda big achilles heel

Everything moves as it should and doesn't do weird shit... except for the legs. I shoulda seen it coming, but the lack of any flexibility between either part of his leg joints, ie between his thigh and crotch, would pose some issues. As he sits, the crotch plate just deforms

Now there IS a way to make this operate as it should; IE on a ball and socket sort of movement with the parts actually disconnected, but I'm too tired to look into how to do that, so I'll leave him the way he is now. There are 2 other things. One I will fix and one I might fix..

His arms are too thin, and there is a slight fur malfunction on his right ear. You can see it when I perk him up like in this pose. I will fix the fur issue. If it's not TOO much of a pain, I'll also try and beef up his arms a bit. I'll also look into the leg fix later

Fixed the fur again. Now the ears can move around into whatever position they want to. For example: Sad Wiz, Alert Wiz, and Normal Wiz. I mainly put these bones here to animate a little wiggle in them as he walks C:

On to this part of the mesh now. You can see here, the crotch plate deforms significantly when the leg is moved, which obviously isn't going to look good when animating. Unfortunately, there's not really a "right" way to fix this. It's all just going to be kinda jank

However, we CAN make this better with a hack that the other Protogen model you've seen everywhere does, and it's insetting the joint into the leg to create a sort of "ball and socket" look. This would also allow the 2 parts to just clip into each other, rather than deform

You can see the "black donut of shame" here on the inside of the model. This part of the mesh will be doing all of the bending and deforming as the legs move, which would be bad if it had any sort of texture paint on it, but it's a solid color, so not really an issue

here's a shot with the fix in place. Is it perfect? no. Is there a better way to do this? Also no. This is just a bit of an inherent design flaw with Wiz having 2 inflexible parts next to each other that need to move organically. Such is life

I put him into a sitting position, and you can see the difference between the 2 sides. The right side is so deformed that it's reaching across the middle of the mesh and deforming the left! Yikes!

Testing to be sure that the mesh isn't effected when the legs are moved by creating the largest thigh gap in human history. There does seem to be a bit of overlap between the sides though. Look at the inside lines of each leg. Those paints should not be there

Hmmmm seems to be on some other group. Really tempted to just not worry about it since this position will literally NEVER come up

Yay it's fixed. Time to never see this atrocity again

REACH UP FOR THE SUNRISE
PUT YOUR HANDS INTO THE BIG SKY
YOU CAN TOUCH THE SUNRISE
FEEL THE NEW DAY ENTER YOUR LIFE

Took FOREVER to get this working right, but all of the weight painting is now done, which means that Wiz is now fully rigged and ready to animate into different poses. I won't be animating for a little bit because I want to take a break from this. I've been at this for a WHILE

There is one thing that I do need to do before I can take a break, and that is rig up inverse kinematics. What they do is essentially allow for one joint to move, and the rest will follow. This GREATLY speeds up the animation process

HIS LEGS BE MOVIN

The last step is to put Wiz into a rest position, which I have done now. This provides a good base to start animating. Also my internet decided to die, so I'm making do with my phone whee

Anyways. I'm gonna take a break for a bit. I'll animate him soon though, don't worry :)

You know, for someone with absolutely 0 artistic experience of any kind, I did a damn good job on this model. Hands could use a little more work, but I ain't complaining for a FIRST MODEL.

Wiz waves goodbye for now!

Time to get the ball rolling again on this, or should I say walking! I'm doing a basic walk animation right now, but I'm doing something kinda neat! I'm syncing it up to my favorite song, Temptation by New Order! I also want to do a run animation, in double time to the same song!

He desyncs at the end because moving the viewport causes the animation to lag slightly, but it's perfectly in time! The song is at 125 BPM, and since I'm animating at 25FPS, I can put a keyframe every 12 frames and be *perfectly* in time

I should also mention that this is, naturally, VERY early animation stuff. I've only been at this for maybe 30 minutes, so the movement is still quite stiff and robotic, rather than fluid and natural. I'll refine this with time so that he moves correctly. This was just a test!

Working from the bottom up and you can see how much more refined the legs are as opposed to the torso. He's movin and groovin now. Just gotta make the top part of his body play along

OH

MY GOD

All I need to do is animate the arms tomorrow, and I think this animated sequence is ready to go on to production!

OFC I don't want to spend *too* much time on this since I'm going to be remaking this model in the not too distant future, or at least significantly changing it. The visor shape is a little off, the arms and hands are still a mess, and the shoulder pads are mishapen

This will all probably happen either sometime next month or really whenever if I keep using this model for memes or whatever. I learned a LOT while making him, and I can do it so, so much better if given a second chance

Got the arms animated after some fiddling, and I wanted to be sure that the animation speed and everything is still matching properly, and yep! He's PERFECTLY in time with the song. Time to finalize the animation and render it

What if Wiz glowed

This is why I need a 3070

I'm not going to say that using particle hair was a bad idea, but I probably should have just done it in the mesh itself. It's a BITCH to render. IF I CAN GET A 30 SERIES THOUGH, THIS WILL NOT BE A PROBLEM >:C

He walks! The tail looks moderately ridiculous, but other than that, he looks absolutely amazing! It only took almost an hour to render this

This was to be a more intricate scene with a miata in the middle and whatnot, but my computer said "no " to rendering that. I'll probably make a better composition that shows him walking better later on. I need to shelve this again though as I have some other work to do

ok that other work is done, so now we're back here. Looking at this, there are 2 things that I need to fix. The first is the speed. Wiz is walking way too slow. I tried to animate him to Temptation, but the temp just isn't right. I'll have to speed him up

The second thing is that the composition is ass. I wanted to have some other props and stuff in the scene, but Wiz is too intensive to animate with all of that, so I need to simplify and move the focus to him

I boosted him from 24 FPS up to 30, and he moves a lot more smoothly now and at a better pace. I did the math, and he should be in step with a song at 150 BPM, so lemme see if I have anything at that speed

Awww yeah this is a lot better. Time to fix the composition

Trying to figure out what's wrong with this Miata model i found online. The driver side headlight is "dark" for some reason, and it shows up in the material. This isn't even in rendered view!

Aaaaaaand it looks like the issue was normals! recalculated them and it seems to be ok now. Apparently this model has modeled lights that will pop up, but I have 0 idea how to actually raise them

Trying rudimentary hair physics and it's not going particularly well

The hair on Wiz's body doesn't need any sort of animation since it's so short, but his tail could definitely use it since it's longer. I have a feeling though that this might be a bit too much for me at the moment. I'll see

The issue is that when the simulation starts, the hair doesn't move with the model, and instead just hangs out behind the character, which is obviously not how hair is supposed to work. Not sure why it's doing this yet

Looks like I'm not doing this

Anyways it's time to render. I'm going to just remove the hair because it's going to take way too long to render for almost no visual difference. The only one I'll keep is the tail

There we go! The first animation is now officially done! He looks pretty good. Shame I couldn't get the tail fur to animate, but eh live and let die. Not using particle hair in the future. I can't believe I did this, from scratch, by myself

There's still 2 more animations to do though. One is an idle animation, and then a special animation of my choice, so those should be fun. I'll probably start working on the idle one tonight!

Dammit, I messed up the glass texture on the Miata. Fixed it now. I'll have to rerender this in the future as a result. Probably could do it even higher quality for the meme too, so I'll do that when I finish this project once and for all

Aaaaaanyways now that all of that is settled and finalized, it's time to move on to the second animation. This one is going to be an idle animation. IE Wiz just standing around like a dumbass

I was going to animate something a bit more, well, animated, but I decided to just do a nice slow breathing animation instead. Looks great!

I'm actually reanimating this, not only because I want something closer to Wiz to show off the animation better, but because I forgot to select the stupid fur textures for the render. D'oh

There we go. Much better and easier to see the movement

And a nice high res render in cycles. Much more lifelike reflections and light refractions for Twitter to compress into oblivion

Moving forward again, I need to make the third animation now for the project. This one needs to be a "special" animation. So maybe like a jump, run, or something like that. Any ideas?

What would show Wiz's personality, but also wouldn't be SIN to animate? This is genuinely hard to think about

I'm gonna try and be a bit more daring. I'm going to have Wiz get in the Miata, turn on the lights, and then drive off. I've got a lot of time left over to work on this, so I'm going for it. Currently splitting the mesh up and making the lights work

Miata friend is coming to life

I wish the person who made this model asymmetrical a very BURN IN HELL YOU SCUMBAG

Oh yeah I'm an idiot. Turns out it IS symmetrical, I just rotated it like .5 degrees

It's being a bit of an asshole, but at least the other light is now moving. Still need to set up a light source though as now it just looks like one of the lights is burnt out

Holy shit FINALLY

Finally, we're moving fast. Running lights seem to be easy peasy

Progress has slowed a lot. I'm incompetent still, and I had a very bad talk with my grandmother, so I'm a little shaken up, but nonetheless, we're still moving forward. At least I've got the happiest damn car face on the planet to cheer me up

Finally, I think the lights are good now. They project too far out, but to be honest, I don't really care a lot. It should be fine for the project

One day I'll make this image a reality

Oh btw it's an animation too. Messed with sound design on this one

God I hate that Twitter murders video. Hopefully you can make it out though

Slightly better I guess as a gif? You lose audio though

Cycles rendering (the good one) doesn't like my headlights, so I'm going in and seeing why it doesn't. The material *should* be transmitting light through it, but it isn't. Time to play around a bit

Well I got it working, but then i realized that I made everything WAY TOO BIG. I scaled it down, and I think now I see why I was getting so many washed out textures. These lights are POWERFUL

omg baby

modern cars be like

Nyooom

Omfg Twitter's compression literally made this unwatchable. Are you kidding me?

Not bad me. Not bad

And there's a day render of it. I'm stunned at how lifelike it looks

Made an animation to test complex motion like starting from a stop. I think I nailed it! I'm also experimenting with other ways to make Twitter not kill media, so hopefully this isn't mush

I've been goofin around for a bit now, but this project is due in a tiny bit over a week, and I haven't even finished all of the mesh work yet. Tonight, I REALLY NEED to get the driver side door rigged to be animated so I can start on the last animation for the project

I'm not going to worry about the passenger door right now. It's not a part of the animation, so it's being omitted. This is becoming pretty important now

Yay a slightly manky door. All of the exterior meshes are fine, and that's all that matters. I WILL be animating this door facing *away* from the camera, so this should work fine

And now it opens. Hooray! Time to compile this model and export it BACK to the Wiz animation file so that I can start working on making beep boop idiot get in the thing

Aaaaaaaaand we're good to go. Time to export

Hello friend. So funny thing, the rigged Miata is the right size. Wiz and the dummy Miata are WAY too big

There is a problem with just scaling everything down. If I do that, Wiz uhhhhhh... explodes

Got the scaling worked out. A-are Miatas THAT small? Wiz is 6 feet tall, same as me. I didn't even make him taller for his ears. How TF am I gonna fit this into a Miata????

Aaaaaaaaaaand it looks like we're good to go. I'll need to remake the scene smaller of course, but the models are now the right size. Then comes the pain of animating this. This is gonna push my limits I will say