Somewhat Rested, Now We Try Again
May was a hard month for me for a lot of reasons, but so far June has been everything I've wanted and more. Now I'm working on exercising consistently, eating better, and currently trying to learn how to rig a monster for a game Hawk's working on for himself. In August I'm going to try making a tiny game (if I can learn enough about Godot before then, lmao. No promises). And after that I'm going to try making my first mini music-video idea. The first of MANY.
It's about time I started taking creating stuff more seriously. I wanted to start back in May, but after how the last week of April went, I knew that wasn't going to happen. Now I've spent the better part of the first two weeks resting and relaxing and just settling back into a routine. So now that it's the 16th, it's time I start that plan for real.
The plan going forward (although I know I'll have to trim one or two things off if I really plan to make this work) is narrowing down my interests to Rigging, Sculpting, and Animating in Blender, and game development in Godot. That is way too many things as it is, and even though most of it is in Blender, trying to learn two different pieces of software in tandem will always slow things down. So right now Game Development is taking a backseat until I can regularly practice Rigging/Sculpting/Animating on a daily schedule since I'm not there yet. The main issue right now is learning to navigate the UI in Blender and growing comfortable with how to work in it. I have more than enough courses and tutorials to learn everything I need to (and then some). So now it's just getting down to brass tacks and just doing the courses I bought.
Let's start with Rigging.
A while ago, Pierrick from P2Design released his updated rigging course. I have to say, rigging was incredibly confusing and strange to understand even with the course. The instructions Pierrick gave made perfect sense, and I was able to follow along and get the same outcomes he did, but I didn't understand why or how it was working. It wasn't until I remade the ball rig 5-6 times before the way it all worked really came together in my head. Even Pierrick's instructions made more sense. Following along with the video the third time around was when I really started to notice a difference in what I was learning. Every time I redid the rig, I got more comfortable with something about the way it was made, and that made paying attention to the other parts of the instructions easier on the next rewatch, which made it make more sense, and it just kept looping like that until now I feel pretty confident I understand what to do.
The next rig is the Spider Ball rig, which I know will take me much longer to understand. But I'm going to take it slow and I'm going to remake the ball rig at least 2 more times until I can make it without watching the video at all. I think if I can do that I'll have made a strong start on my rigging knowledge.
Moving onto Sculpting, I actually spent the majority of today's Sculpting time (a little less than an hour) making the base mesh.
It could probably be a lot better, I just don't know...how yet. Maybe I'll get a better understanding once I finish putting in the major shapes (planning to add the tail using DynoTopo since I want to get more comfortable with that tool). Or maybe once I start adding in the details... We'll see.
This is for a challenge in the CGBoost Sculpting course. I am trying to get through as much of it as I can before CGCookie launches their new Sculpting course, since I plan to take it as well and see if I learn anything new.
I didn't get any animation done today, but I think that's okay. My weekends are mainly about relaxing since I try to only keep my weekdays intense with work. We'll see if I can stick true to that promise, lol.
Tomorrow, though, I need to make sure I fully rig one ball so that I can keep the information and workflow fresh in my mind. I'll also need to animate an arcing bouncing ball. I've done it before, I just need to practice it a lot more.