This week had a lower rhythm. But I have a new project in scope and a mind to work things - though I was distracted by my own desire to do my own thing this week. This week has a lot of focus on the painterly project, a character design, colour render tests and lineart - and more layout planning and mapping. I also work a Blender Royale and work the QnA. Other projects still are on standby.
Performance
This week had a realistic close to reality when it comes to needed points. I also nearly populated the sprint to be up to what I needed - but at the end of the day I only managed about half of the need working a typical 40 hour week. So efficiency hovered around half way. This still shows I am over capacity and maybe don't have the full mind to push the projects forward with laser focus. On the upbeat, I am still quoting casually - but with the strategy that I would like to burn bridges with high prices. Either it's a great deal for me, or no deal now. Demand for what I do is too high.
The Painterly Project
I had a good time this week working and kitbashing a robot character. It was easier to build him from pieces than drawing him up immediately. The process involved some grease pencil to plan ideas, and I took my old DJ decks that I had digitized as models. I then worked the remeshing technique to get the soft forms to make the geometry feel more organic and then built the robot. First iterations were nearly a homerun! To help with the language design, I used a flat shading view of the 3D modeling to work the blockout - then focused on the colours and details. His colour scheme I'm still not sure how to work - but we will see how he turns out. I can already feel the love in the rig for this guy - and the fun animation. He's a true party bot.
Other aspects of the project was me trying to render out higher quality frames - working the shape language, colour and contrast. I noticed that my abstract cyberpunk designs were a little hard to read - so I had to work the ideas a little better to be much more explicit. But the colour contrast and luminance contrast is possible and necessary in the project - and after a vote the green and red contrast is highly necessary. I am happy to see my brush cloud technique handy to paint and blur detail per what I need - so I will try make a bit more brush like controls that are easily linked and overridable in the project - and also quick to setup to the camera. I am finding that the point cloud system that needs the camera is a little trick since you have to re-link cameras or animate nulls to cameras often to make sure the depth perception for the parrallax works.
On another note, I also was requested to make some song art and album art - so I started working cameras and models to make sure the final style is close to final frames. I also started experimenting with the grease pencil lineart modifier to define edges - and use them baekd for performance. I will definately be using this technique on the main characters for legibility, but not on the world.
So with the new lineart, the new character and the modeling techniques - I'm starting to make the world come alive. I also started freezing Geometry Nodes assets - because doing layout with them live has proven to be very heavy on my machine - best to work with frozen assets from the asset library. So.. I had a blas this week on the project, lot's of little detail and lots of progress on multiple fronts.
Other Projects
In the blog post I also show a gallery and information about the Blender Royale of this week and the Q&A&Critique! Was a very busy week - though relaxed.
