{"id":1423,"date":"2011-11-02T17:02:33","date_gmt":"2011-11-02T21:02:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/?p=1423"},"modified":"2011-11-02T17:02:33","modified_gmt":"2011-11-02T21:02:33","slug":"thrilling-tales-its-all-about-the-ladies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/2011\/11\/02\/thrilling-tales-its-all-about-the-ladies\/","title":{"rendered":"Thrilling Tales: it&#8217;s all about the ladies"},"content":{"rendered":"<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/grafx2\/blog\/Thrilling-Tales-Ladies.jpg\" alt=\"Ladies of Retropolis\" width=\"501\" height=\"251\">\n<div style=\"width:450px;margin-left:25px;margin-top:12px;\">\n<p align=\"left\">Well, it&#8217;s not <em>really<\/em> all about the ladies; but they&#8217;re what I had to drop into this picture.<\/p>\n<p align=\"left\">During this round in which (theoretically) I&#8217;m working on Part Two of <em>The Toaster With TWO BRAINS <\/em>(while also catching up on a web project) and in which (actually) I&#8217;m building character assets like mad because I need so many folks in the background for upcoming scenes not only in <em>TWO BRAINS<\/em> but also in <em>The Lair of the Clockwork Book, <\/em>while still, truly, catching up on that web project, and &#8211; as I see with some dismay &#8211; constructing overlong sentences that just won&#8217;t die, I have been practically incommunicado because my nose is pressed so firmly into my monitor.<\/p>\n<p align=\"left\">But I&#8217;ve done great, though undetectable, things: I&#8217;ve completely revamped my work flow for creating <em>female<\/em> character heads, with much greater controls over their expressions, and every one of these new heads uses the same object topology so that if I really wanted to, I could probably morph <em><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/grafx2\/blog\/thrilling-tales-face-morphs.jpg\" alt=\"Face Morphs\" width=\"170\" height=\"684\" align=\"left\"><\/em>them from one character to another. This involved some difficult work over five days &#8211; not counting making the actual heads you see here &#8211; but it&#8217;s the kind of thing that will continue to help me out in the future. The new system worked so well that I even rebuilt my Gwen Hopkins character&#8217;s head completely from scratch, since she has a lot of upcoming scenes in <em>TWO BRAINS<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p align=\"left\"><em>Male<\/em> heads, on the other hand, are still ahead of me; I have to redo that preliminary work for them because their object topology will <em>not<\/em> be the same. But happily I still have the original (though incompatible) data for Nat Gonella&#8217;s head, and I&#8217;ll eventually be rebuilding that one with the new system, too.<\/p>\n<p align=\"left\">But it&#8217;s not <em>all <\/em>about the heads. I&#8217;ve also finally done some 3D sculpting work that I actually <em>like<\/em> for clothing. I&#8217;ve turned out a bunch of different base garments and a number of texture variations on them, with more to come, so that you won&#8217;t think everyone in Retropolis shares the same clothes. <em>This<\/em> new approach involves high and low resolution versions of the garments, where I&#8217;ve built them completely in the higher resolution and then baked their textures and normals into low resolution versions of the same clothing. I&#8217;ll even have the higher resolution clothes there for use in some of my really large renderings.<\/p>\n<p align=\"left\">So this period of a few weeks is just about all concerned with what, in a perfect world, would have been pre-production. I just don&#8217;t have the luxury of doing all that work at a more sensible time, when I&#8217;m not still under the evil eye of my schedule. Because for as long as I&#8217;m doing a serial I am <em>always<\/em> under the schedule&#8217;s evil eye.<\/p>\n<p align=\"left\">The bothersome thing is that this work &#8211; though it will benefit <em>TWO BRAINS<\/em> &#8211; is coming out of the <em>TWO BRAINS<\/em> part of my schedule. The publication schedule for the Clockwork Book makes it a cruel master.<\/p>\n<p align=\"left\">I just need two of me, I guess.<\/p>\n<p align=\"left\">Anyway, it&#8217;s back to more of the same and some other stuff. I ought to get back to <em>The Clockwork Book<\/em> in a month &#8211; it would be better to do that even sooner. In the meantime, I&#8217;m an asset building machine.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well, it&#8217;s not really all about the ladies; but they&#8217;re what I had to drop into this picture. During this round in which (theoretically) I&#8217;m working on Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS (while also catching up on a web project) and in which (actually) I&#8217;m building character assets like mad because I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,12,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-graphics","category-thrilling-tales","category-works-in-progress"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1423"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1423\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webomator.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}