I did the scars as a bump map using bpainter. Then figured out how to string normal and bump nodes so that everything would go in nicely.
Normal map texture colour out plugs in to colour in of normal map node. Normal socket out of normal map node plugs into normal in of bump map node.
Scar image texture colour out plugs in to height in of bump map node and alpha out plugs into strength in. Normal out of bump node goes into normal in of another bump node if chaining more on or into normal in of the principled bsdf shader.
The scars look a lot more brutal than I've been drawing them :S
This is the third or fourth time I've redone them, previous times they seemed to be saving out with the correct colour but kept getting applied with this darker colour instead.
and it turned out it was because of the alpha setting in the image.
It was on straight which might be the default option, and as I was saving out to openexr it needed to be on premultiplied. I'll remember that for the tattoos, I really don't want to be doing them after this time (they're next after I've finished the scars).
But I still had to go over the dark ones with the correct colour -_-
As a quickie breakie from redoing scars, I had another look at the Sona script and after writing out a sentence decided I didn't like the script I'd derived from World Unity Alphabet after all (part of the reason being it didn't feel nice to write and also didn't look great when I put it into a sentence plus it felt like it would take forever even after I got practised with it).
So I had another look at Dotsies which was one of the many I had investigated previously. I played around with the standard version before rearranging the mapping to Sona frequency which meant vowels first, N after and then just kind of followed the order in the Sona book and then ended with y as it's vaguely a vowel and mostly seems to be a separator and the last dotsies character looks kind of like a pipe.
Now the problem I had with these little dots is that they're kind of hard to write, but I found it a lot easier when I made a dot matrix grid.
Dotsies was a lot easier to pick up writing-wise and it was reasonably quick filling in the dots (though I've already forgotten what letters are what x_x). I also got a reasonable looking script just drawing the shapes (which were also done on a grid which I hid to see what it would look like on "blank paper" though I imagine in my head-universe dot matrix grid paper would be as common as lined paper when they wrote on paper and most of them write on tablets anyway which would probably be quicker and easier).
I have no idea how correct or otherwise the Sona is.
I've done two samples of each dotsies; above the visible grid concentrates on the shape of the entire word, below the visible grid concentrates on the shape of each radical, and also somewhat randomly experimenting with leaving single dots or connecting them all. Trying to decide what looks better and will be clearer.
And that's something any non-techy readers I might have left can weigh in on if they so feel the inclination _;
I am trying to find somewhere to squeeze in more pics and fics, I think I need to drop something, I am so flat tack it's starting to give me headaches again, and I was going to say I can barely breathe but that's just the cold weather x_x
This post also appears on my blog.
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Thanks for looking! _
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