Ive learned how to model stuff :D

A lil while ago, I saw a drawing someone made in my server and thought "That looks easy enough to model".

I was woefully wrong.

After spending 4 hours trying to get the head down and using an ungodly amount of loop cuts, I gave in. Later that night I was talking with a friend and the conversation eventually got onto the topic of the shameful attempt at modeling that had transpired just hours earlier. My main struggle was a lack of reference, as the image I was working off of was at a 3/4s perspective. In response, my friend sent me their own characters turnaround sheets. The next day I finished modeling and texturing them (the picture above). The day after that Id fully rigged them.

I am very glad I decided to jump headlong into that first modeling attempt, as that failure led me to spend sometime properly learning the craft. Now I have an assortment of new tools under my belt and some have already proven very very handy. In the past to animate a png, I would work entirely within sony vegas. The issue with that is that sony vegas is not an animation program, its sony vegas. To get squash and stretch on the images id need to use a deform effect, and then pan and rotate it to wherever i needed. The problem is that the deform keyframes and the panning keyframes often desync themselves, leading most of my time being spent fixing these sync problems rather than actually animating. Yesterday I needed to animate 2 images, and instead of animating them in sony vegas, I decided to animate them in blender. Within 15 minutes I had rigged and animated them both. If I had done that in sony vegas it would have taken me atleast a whole day to finish the animation, if not more.

With this new found power ive also started designing my little sona guy. I dont really have a defined mascot for my channel outside of my soldier loadout, and it feels kinda weird to have the way I portray myself just be a tf2 merc. Ive been wanting to make stuff not entirely reliant on tf2 for a while now, and learning to design my own unique characters is a huge step in that. I plan on using the lil guy in a channel bumper. Just a lil short animation before the video plays. I just think thatd be neat.

As an aside, Ive learned that if i stop being a little bitch about not having a drawing tablet, I can actually draw pretty well with my mouse. As for the book I talked about in the last post, Im nearly done with it. Ill be back to animating soon. Anyways I wish your sonas much saturation, and your lore cannoned. Bi bibibi bi (fades away into the mist)