Wireframe overlays in Blender 2.8

Heavypoly workflow for Blender

It's a schizophrenic time for me and Blender at the moment, with Speedflow up-dates and the new 2.8 version in the works, I probably shouldn't look into this alternative workflow tutorial by Heavypoly.



If you go to the video on his channel, you are given the links to a bunch of config scripts and a startup file to install into a current daily build version of Blender. This is his own unique layout, pie menu tools and other nifty things to get even the newest Blender user up to speed. I'm new to Blender myself so I'm interested in trialing this cool work-flow to see if it fits.

I'm only a little into the tutorial as of this writing, but so far it's been nice. His teaching style is very clear and the pie menus, tools and layout make Blender feel like a new software.

Simple talk test

Because this particular drawing just uses strokes for the face (eyes, nose and lips are all just strokes), it was very easy to move them around and create face animation.

Reproducing character designs in MOHO.

I'm considering doing a new animation project in Moho, it's been a while and I'll be re-learning yet again the whole process.
The animation will illustrate an old pop song (yet again), and I've had it on my mind for a few years actually. To that end I doodled around to get some character designs up, and have chosen to do all my concept art in MyPaint. I choose this program based on it's simplicity, it may lack certain tools but it is also easy to navigate and work in. I wanted to use Krita but I'd be expending a lot of time learning that program when I just need to pump out artwork and story boards.

Here are some of the latest character designs.

I took one of these images into Moho to re-create with vectors. I want to keep this entire thing bound within a tight color palette, and Moho has the capacity to let you import your own custom swatches,  so I created 2 swatches based on old illustration I found online.

Below is the recreated design, reproduced with the two different color treatments. The color swatches allow you to easily eye-drop color and quickly alter the vector art.

It remains to be seen whether I continue with this project, these things take a lot of time and there's no pay-off, I can't even put them on YouTube for copyright reasons due to my persistence of using old songs, but they are the only things that inspire visual ideas in my head.

LightWave 2018: More render testing.

Just in the interest of keeping up to date I have included another test render I did with LW 2018. It's just an old scene updated with the new shaders and lighting. I've included the older version done with LW 2015 for comparison.

LW 2018

LW 2015

Blender 2.8 development.

There are quite a lot of videos circulating, previewing various aspects of the new Blender user interface. It's all rather exciting and a little bit scary (some users really like Blender as it is), yet we can download the very latest beta builds of 2.8 and play around to see how it fits. I think this is a real effort to make the interface easier and faster to use, and Blender starts to look less like the ugly duckling of 3D programs and more the swan.




The video below demonstrates the new ability to edit multiple separate objects at the same time, which is surely going to speed up many an artist's's workflow.



Keep an eye on these new developments as they happen, there are interesting new features being added also, the future looks very bright for Blender.