gunner weapon and run animation

Took me this long. His weapon's textured completely now, and I've made a looping run animation test of him.

Gunner Rifle Weapon

I finally decided on the gunner's rifle weapon. Not textured yet. He'll also have a pistol as a secondary weapon.

wrist rot problem fixed

After a long time, I tried working on the gunner's wrist problem once more. I bothered downloading The Mancandy FAQ only to find out it didn't explain how the rigging in the wrist worked.

I tried searching in BlenderArtists and found a solution in a thread. It was this blend file in particular (made by doncuan) that gave me the idea. However, I did realize that I had modeled my character's mesh without giving forethought to wrist rotation. This other blend file (made by Vertex Pusher) demonstrates a much better forearm mesh designed to twist properly. I'll study it in detail when I make a new character.

I also modeled and rigged the gunner's weapon. Its not textured yet. After looking at it, I decided it looked too much like a fireman's hose, so I'm going to make a different model.

Quong, and the ever elusive ideal firearm weapon for the gunner

Look at that. Look at that weird beehive looking... thing, which most of you will probably not bother looking at anyway. Its the quong hex keyboard layout but modified a bit 'cause I felt like it. I've been making up the code to make a hex keyboard in the Nintendo DS. Soon enough, I was outlaying a simple GUI library for it. That pic's just the concept layout though.

Ultimately, I want to make a homebrew app for the DS that's similar to Tiddlywiki: some sort of guerrilla wiki for the DS.

Moving on, I was about to make animations for the gunner soldier when I realized he doesn't have the props. So I've been making new concepts for fictional guns/rifles (which I will not show yet). So much reference images I've downloaded from the Web, and yet its still pretty hard to be creative when you're lazy, and prefer to spend the weekend fapping to porn instead, which means I'm not finished yet.

wrist rot problem

See, this is the problem.

Its like you take a piece of paper, roll it to a tube, then twist it. It'll lose volume and shape. I need to make a way to have a wrist bone that will deform the mesh properly. I've looked over Mancandy and it uses an approach I never saw before. I'll try it in the weekend.

Monday, 4 February 2008 20:16:25 PHT

Got sick. Hadn't done much. I was also trying out homebrew dev on a Nintendo DS.

Sunday, 27 January 2008 23:38:35 PHT

I hadn't expected painting textures would take so much time. Two days and this is the only thing I made. Still not used to it. Nevertheless, its good that I've made something close to average quality considering its been a long time (2+ years?) since I did CG.



In other news: ಠ_ಠ

Monday, 21 January 2008 21:19:33 PHT

Not much work was done.

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I spent the Saturday buying a new 400 GB hard drive (which has practically only 372.61 GB of space). It turned out to be a Western Digital Caviar SE.

The only problem was that the store had no stock of SATA data cables, so it took me quite a while scouring shops for one. I got one for PHP 30.00 (roughly USD 0.75).

Then I tested the new hard drive for defects, reorganized my files, made some DVD backups, and that was it. The weekend was over before I noticed.

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Changed the inner shirt's color. I think this one suits him better. His color scheme should be monotonous and unextravagant.

I realized I made the mistake of giving tiny objects (the belt buckles) more UV texture space, which was practically useless since they're only a few pixels big compared to the other parts of the gunner 3d model.

Even the head's UV texture is using up too much space. The glove's texture is the one that needs more space, so maybe next time I'll readjust the UVs.

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In other news, a man's family was involuntarily abducted by 14th century feudal Japanese assassins. He is currently seeking ways to finance a rescue operation.

Saturday, 12 January, 2008 21:55:27 PHT

So I heard over here that keeping a journal about the stuff that you do helps to force you focus on what you're doing. Well, I was getting lazy, and I thought to myself, instead of continuing to spend weekends just fapping to porn, this'll be what I'm doing.

I still have no Internet connection in my home computer, so updates will be slow. Weekly, probably.

The gunner model is the first task. I'm working on the textures right now. I figure buying a Wacom tablet would speed up the process (after learning how to use it), but I just don't want to spend right now.

After that:

• fix wrist bone
• model/texture weapons
• idle and move animation
• off to coding
• ???
• PROFIT
  

Not necessarily in that order.

I just found out that Blender actually does allow textured meshes to recieve lighting, and the feature was there, ever since the ancient 2.2x versions. The only problem is that the lamps should be in the same layer as the mesh object in question. Nevertheless, this thing should have been on by default.

In other news, King Leonidas of the Spartans announces his next preferred place of dining.