Reflection #44 – August 21

Another month, another reflection.

I feel like I won’t have much to say this time… ah anyway:

I spent the first week to finish up a private commission that I had to rush a bit to get done in time before my departure. On the day of my second vaccine I then got back to my old living place and visit my family once again. The side effects of the vaccine were tame in comparison to what I have hard from friends, it robbed me of a couple hours of sleep that day nonetheless.

So to break up my routine a bit during my ‘vacation’ I merely worked on Blender to force my self to learn a bit more about it. I still haven’t left the peak of the iceberg but the little knowledge I acquired helped me to slowly get on to understand the software a little more. It is still quite difficult for me to learn new things there and it will take a lot longer than I initially anticipated to get where I want to be in order to use the program for my art. To achieve this, I should reserve some days of the week to learn more of the program; the weekends should be ideal.

Hopefully I’ll find some nice tutorials or objectives to look forward to be doing.

My start with blender had to do a lot about sculpting. Organic shapes have been fun to play around with. Although they are not my main goal, working sculpts was a nice way to get acquainted with the rendering methods, what to keep in mind and also how to decrease render time.

I gotta say, though Blender is not a shiny perfect program. It constantly shifts its layout, making it difficult to look up techniques or follow along some tutorials from older versions. Then there are some technical issues, like crashes that get really frustrating, so yeah learning with this program has its ups and downs.

Once I got a little familiar with sculpting, I started some purposeful projects:

My go to thing to do is work out my character Zavi. The bust is rather quickly modelled, despite having some freak-outs with the polycount sometimes, it’s a rather fun and peasant workload.

It’s getting difficult with the UV-texturing though. The program starts to get very laggy when working on a basic 2k res texture and applying them isn’t always free of some hiccups with the perspective, applying colour to spaces you don’t want to and then going back and forth with the texturing.

Getting the hair through particles can be quite daunting as well, especially because it doesn’t usually turn out to look that nice, but I’m just a started, I bet there’s better ways than what I did.

For the bust of Zavi, I had to redo the fur and some details a week and two smaller projects later and still worked over the shots in CSP. That’s definitely not where I want to be heading with my work except maybe after I have dived into animation.

Sadly this month didn’t produce more to share. Aside from some smaller things in blender, I only did a couple of sketch pages with nothing more than to stay in shape, I don’t consider them worth to upload.

As for the upcoming days and weeks. I got another private little thing to be done in a few days, after that, I’ll work on the vulture awareness day piece, something traditional in my sense :3

Before my 2nd semester will start, I plan to get back into animation, which should be a good way to get back into a more creative state. Ideas for drawing are still in the back of my mind and how busy the study work will turn out to be will affect my projects substantially.

I definitely enjoyed my time away from my study place to re-socialize and have some fun and new experience in the creative world. Even if I couldn’t be as productive in terms of projects…

With that said, I’m looking forward to the next month. I hope you all will enjoy it!

~Souvillaine