3d art sideblog

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types Rating: Explicit Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Shaun Hastings/Desmond Miles Characters: Shaun Hastings, Desmond Miles Additional Tags: Muscle Pain, Massage, Touch-Starved, Sexual Tension, First Time, Hand Jobs, Clothed Sex, Underwear, First Kiss, Getting Together, Domestic

“Not criticising you,” Desmond said. “Just noting that next time we’ll go a bit lighter on the compounds especially.”

“You’re implying that there will be a next time.” Shaun kept his eyes closed and his body very still. “If you ever so much as think about making me do another lunge again I’ll haunt you in your sleep.”

Desmond laughed again. He was silent for a few moments, a silence Shaun knew meant he was forming a thought, and then:

“You know, I could try and help with the soreness.”

Chapters: 3/3 Fandom: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Shaun Hastings/Desmond Miles Characters: Shaun Hastings, Desmond Miles, Rebecca Crane (Assassin's Creed), Lucy Stillman Additional Tags: Pining, Unresolved Tension, resolved tension, Idiots in Love, Denial of Feelings, Awkward Crush, Flirting, Teasing, Getting Together, It's Just A Game Until It's Not

“Ah, yeah, Kate,” he answered absent-mindedly, hands still on the keyboard, eyes moving across the screen, “Katie, Katie, Katie” and he knew he was stalling, knew he was taking entirely too much time to answer a seemingly simple question. He could have just said no. He said instead: “Charmed the pants right off her, I did,” which caused Rebecca to make a sound that immediately told him it had been the entirely wrong thing to say in this moment.

Rebecca, who had known him then and knew him now, who had been there for his entirely one-sided fight with the word gay and had also been there when the word had won. He could not, in any plausible way, be angry at her for laughing at what he’d just said.

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types Rating: Mature Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Shaun Hastings/Desmond Miles Characters: Shaun Hastings, Desmond Miles Additional Tags: Autistic Shaun Hastings, Established Relationship, Lazy Mornings, Morning Cuddles, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Stimming, That Is Not A Stim Toy

“Shaun,” he said again, and felt it come out breathy.

Shaun made a noise that clearly meant No.

Desmond tried again. “Shaun. Are you stimming with my dick right now?”

Chapters: 2/3 Fandom: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Shaun Hastings/Desmond Miles Characters: Shaun Hastings, Desmond Miles, Rebecca Crane (Assassin's Creed), Lucy Stillman Additional Tags: Mutual Pining, Domestic Summary:

“Ah, yeah, Kate,” he answered absent-mindedly, hands still on the keyboard, eyes moving across the screen, “Katie, Katie, Katie” and he knew he was stalling, knew he was taking entirely too much time to answer a seemingly simple question. He could have just said no. He said instead: “Charmed the pants right off her, I did,” which caused Rebecca to make a sound that immediately told him it had been the entirely wrong thing to say in this moment.

Rebecca, who had known him then and knew him now, who had been there for his entirely one-sided fight with the word gay and had also been there when the word had won. He could not, in any plausible way, be angry at her for laughing at what he’d just said.

thank you!!

pillow

hey desmond, whatcha got there? boyfriend? ah, good for you :)

higher quality renders below the cut

it went very badly.

i can only assume i kept checking the reference way too often, so instead of making sure my base *felt* right and then using the reference to tweak, i was trying to get every single brushstroke to be 100% correct immediately. which, obviously, did not work out at all.

i can't even show you what i created, i didn't even save any images. not because it looked bad but because it felt bad.

i did, however, a day later, take out the pressure by fully removing the reference again. i sculpted two decent heads that, while both would have benefitted from being held against a reference at least for the detailing, were fine without reference anyways. i seem to kind of have a good intuition about what goes where, but i need to give myself the freedom to explore the shape without trying to follow a specific form.

i'll definitely need to work out a way to incorporate reference, though. i do want to do fanart sculpts, and for that i need at least some likeness to the character or person i'm trying to create, and that does not go without reference.

while i'm still this early in the process, though, i do think it's fine. i think i can keep exploring things with no pressure for now, or maybe slowly start easing a ref in for the detailing, because that's what lacks the most currently. my shapes are okay, i think.

anyways.

a day after the failed sculpts i opened nomad again and the last try was still open, because that's what nomad does when you don't explicitly close the file, so i thought: why not try and salvage it. why not try and just add some digital clay to this digital not-quite-shape and see where it goes. and it went quite well, i think, because i set sail with zero plan and ended up here:

i've had these renders laying around for a day and a half now, which is unusual for me, because generally i just sculpt and render and post all in one big move and then continue on with my day. but this render differs from the two my middle-aged white men i've done so far in every way and i wanted to make sure i didn't stereotype without meaning to.

i've never sculpted a woman before, i've never sculpted a Black person before, and i've never sculpted someone who wasn't quite angular in the face before.

which are statements that are easy to make when all you've sculpted so far are the heads of two middle-aged white men, but nevertheless true.

so, i hope i did her justice.

getting some color onto my sculpts is a massive process when using blender, because in order for my lineart setup to work, i need to retopologize the sculpt. the lineart is generated by distance and position of vertices against each other, and that gets all kinds of fucked up when you have half a million of them and works very well when you have like 20k, so i'd have to retopo in any case. but i did want to see this head with some materials on it the same day, so i tried my best with the nomad sculpt paint tools.

it went... eh.

you can go all out with vertex painting in nomad, and i've seen people do truly incredible stuff with it, but this was not only my first time using it but also i didn't take my time with it at all, because it was just supposed to show me a general direction and not be a final version.

i'm showing you anyways, because it's part of the process and thus part of this art log thing i'm doing.

again, i hope i did her justice.

and here it is, my first hand-animated human face and head.

today's mission was to get the head rigged and poseable, finally, and i am very happy to announce that i did achieve exactly that. took me about 2.5 hours in total, which for all the issues i still had to fix and all the weird stuff the rig decided to do or, especially, to not do, is quite decent.

the first step i had to do today was give my man some teeth. my rig addon uses them, and also as soon as you want your character to open their mouth even slightly you need a mouth interior for it.

so i got some teeth for him.

looks very weird when in this weird x-ray mode, but you have to place them some way and this is by far the easiest. there is a specific teeth placement and mine don't sit quite right i think, but it will do for now.

the strange balloon shape behind the mouth is what i and at least a handful of industry professionals call the mouth box, basically a surrounding shape for the mouth interior that's closed off so you don't get weird light artefacts or anything. i modeled that before putting the teeth in, that's why they don't fit, but since he won't ever open his mouth wide enough for anyone to actually see inside i deemed it fine for now.

onto the rig, then.

the addon i use is called autorig pro, which does a LOT of the rigging by itself and which has proven to be one of the most valuable addons i've ever gotten. a face rig is no joke because there are so many small details that need to be moveable in varying directions, and it would have taken me a weekend at best to do it all by hand. the addon, however, lets me place a handful of points around important landmarks, which ends up like this:

and then i click some buttons and do some corrections and tinker a little here and there and ta-da, the face rig!

the fun colorful shapes you see are the controllers or drivers or whatever you might want to call them. they're used to drive the rotation, translation or sometimes also scale of the bones that in turn drive the mesh deformation.

basically what this rig does is keep the geometry intact and let me revert back to base whenever i want, all while finally allowing me to pose the guy.

so of course i had to open the mouth and see if everything worked out teeth-wise, which produced this weird thing:

i mean. his mouth is open and his teeth are there and my outlines are getting fucked up all over the place, which i have no clue as to what the reason might be. oh well.

anyways, the rig works. it deforms a little weird around the mouth, which can be fixed by manual adjustment and is something i didn't really care for on a monday at 10pm. i'm doing this to learn the workflow and to go from ipad sculpt to fully posed characterr and take every step along the way in the correct way, which i'm hopefully doing. at least learning to do.

so, naturally, instead of putting him into a regular pose i decided to do a full animation test. you know, because i like to suffer.

kidding. i like animating things, actually. i think i have a decent eye for movement and movement details, and also i like making micro-adjustments and keyframing the shit out of them.

the animation turned out quite good, i think. spoiler. i'll post it as a standalone because it kind of is a finished artwork and needs the proper tags.

so all that would be left for this character is, in theory, painting a texture map for the skin. not to make it look realistic, but to add some color variation for e.g. the lips or around the eyes. just to make it look a lil more interesting. not sure if i'm going to do that, though, or if i'd rather start on the next head sculpt.