jklind

Could it be?

...have I actually, FINALLY picked up my stylus??

In all seriousness, I hope everyone's doing well, and staying safe.

I finally have some free time this weekend, so I'm trying to get back into the habit of drawing so that maybe I can bring some much-needed smiles.  I've no energy for any of the comic ideas I've been getting, but I can at least thumbnail some pinups!

So... yeah.

The news is even more gloom & doom than usual. Stores are either closed or have reduced hours. Toilet paper is scarce, and bidet sales in the U.S. are actually up.  The stock market is best ignored if you have any money invested; spare yourself the pain!

Every dollar helps, but where I'm currently working, now is not the time for me to take yours. It's too much to hope that the world will start to regain its sanity by the time my current contract is up, but in the meantime I'm ...

Something for later

At the moment I'm busy moving some of my stuff up north, the next phase of my contract starts in a few days, and the world gets scarier by the day.

Time for some Daisy boobs!

Will definitely need to revisit this one when I have time.

Roz

A character I've been plotting out for a while, and finally sat down to design - Roz, Daisy's assistant manager.  I may need to come up with another name, seeing as the main inspiration for her is Roz from Night Court, played by Marsha Warfield.

Basically, Roz keeps the diner running smoothly when Daisy's not there. She has Daisy's permission to kick Rose's ass if necessary, and isn't intimidated by Mercy.

Since this is the first time I've drawn her, she's nowhere near final....

Been a while

It took me quite a while, but I'm finally getting ideas for Mimi!

A much-needed break

Good news - my contract is finally complete!

Better(?) news - more work from the same client is expected within a couple of weeks, and could keep me busy for a couple of months. Worst-case scenario, I keep my Patreon's billing paused for those months.

This contract surprised me at every turn, and not in a good way. I spent much of it angry over what I had to deal with. The client at least admitted that the rigs were terrible, but unfortunately couldn't allow them to be fixed, beca...

Cover me!

Free time may have been scarce lately, but I had something to spend it on - game covers! Now I have just one more to finish - Super Mario All-Stars - and then I can get the whole lot printed!

If anyone's interested, I can make print-ready versions of these available, just know they're designed with specific cases in mind - the Famicom & Genesis covers are for the Genesis clamshells, While the NES, SNES, and Super Famicom covers are for those from 2020-02-26 14:02:54 +0000 UTC View Post

Paused!

I'm in the final stretch on this contract!  The most difficult bits are out of the way, so meeting my Tuesday/Wednesday deadline shouldn't be difficult. But after that there's still another animation set to do, though I'll have another week and a half to finish that one. And two weeks after there, there could be more!

So for now, my campaign's billing is paused. One less thing for me to worry about!

Opening a fresh can of rage.

Good - for a month of work, this contract will pay more than my Patreon brings in in a year.

Bad - pretty much everything else about the job.

As we get closer to the end of the month, I may just turn off billing.  This job has left me with no free time so far, and I've been filled with rage nearly 24-7.

Day one on this job was spent finding a workaround for the client's rig.  The IK controls for the character's feet were created at...

Morning bonus

So much for finishing this this weekend - my eyes are burning today, and tomorrow I'll be making up for lost time on my contract. Might even need to work every weekend until the end of the month...

Must it ALWAYS be a nightmare?

The high-res images & source files are delayed at the moment - there's some touch-up I want to do, but I won't have time for that until the weekend. I hope.

Every client has their quirks. Half the time these quirks make me think they just shouldn't be making games.  My current client seems to be the sort that only knows exactly what they want, after they see what they don't. And they effectively robbed me of 3 days last week - Monday & Tuesday were lost to finalizing the co...

No Pressure...

Tomorrow - or perhaps Wednesday - I'll be starting on a new contract. It'll be a short one - a few weeks - but it's my first animation gig in several months, so I'm just a tad nervous. It may take me a day or three of serious frustration & doubt before I'm back up to speed. Or maybe I'll hit the ground running and just crush it. Who knows?

At least for the next week or two, I doubt I'll have much time for personal work, which is why I'm trying to get these two pinups finished as qui...

'Morning!

Update - Finally shaded!

Out of necessity

Sometimes I get really tired of needing to write my own tools out of necessity. Certain things should just be built into the app.

Maya's driven keys - using one object to drive animation on another - have been a feature from the start. The software is over 20 years old. In all that time, the developers haven't thought that perhaps artists will want an easy way to export and reload those keys, in case a rig changes, or if the artist wants to load them onto another rig?

There IS a b...

Current Mood

HOW have I never drawn Daisy in full "it's too early for this crap" mode?  After the past couple of days, I needed to draw something as a change of pace, and this was the first thing that popped into my head this morning...

The past couple of days might be one good example of why Daisy's rig has taken so long - some of the work can be so mentally taxing, I burn myself out quickly, then need to step away from it for a while.

On Sunday, I got my face rigging script working. And...

Another milestone!

As of this morning, my face template script is working!  It still needs some tweaks, but it builds all of the important features without errors! Once those are out of the way, the next step may be to full assemble her rig, and set up some mouth poses.  And also texture her teeth & tongue.

A bit much

With the lip rig figured out, now I can back to the face as who-OH SWEET JESUS TOO MANY CIRCLES!!!

...I MAY need to pick some other shapes to use for the controls, and color-code everything.  Plus visibility toggles, so I can hide the controls when I don't need them. Or I could make a picker UI off to the side. Or all of those things.

Some of these controls will already have visibility toggles - the eyelid shapes (all those tiny circles around the eyes) are hidden by default,...

lips rig!

It's taken a few days, but my lip class for Maya is now working!

What this class does is take two sets of FK controls - one for each lip - and rigs them so they follow the jaw. How much influence the jaw as over each control varies, and can be adjusted.  That influence can even be driven by a slider, and tied to specific expressions!

Writing this script had its own unique challenges...  just getting the script to calculate the jaw's influence on each control took me a wh...

Break time?

With the Christmas pics finally finished, I'm ready for a real vacation...  the holiday season is always stressful, and winter in general is a motivation-killer, but this year I've also been driving more, and have been fighting a nasty cold. But at least by this time next week, I'll be back home where it's warm!

In the meantime, one thing I will be working on is a template script for face rigs. I'm basing it off of what I've built for Daisy, but also want to leave room for more com...

An eyeful

Finding time to draw can be difficult, between driving everywhere to meet with family and friends, fighting a cold, and Michigan just being grey, damp, and depressing this year (though it did snow last night), but I haven't forgotten part 3 of this Christmas series!

Now that Patreon supports multiple images per post, going forward I may update these WIP posts as I refine the images. Normally I post the latest progress on my Discord, but having those updates consolidated in one post coul...

Expected & Unexpected problems

Quick update - apart from visiting family, I lost a few days to a nasty cold. That and Michigan's grey, sunless skies have been major motivation-killers...

Yesterday I finally did an initial build of Daisy's rig, to look for anything that was either broken or unfinished. One thing that was broken - her needed fixing - her breasts wouldn't scale correctly with the rest of her rig. However the rig scales, the breasts would scale twice as much. After some experimentation and re-writing the...

Not to be left out

Thinking the holidays won't interfere with my slow me down seems to be a trap I fall into year after year...

On the bright side, in the past couple of days I've checked some more items off of my 3D to-do list, which should mean that Daisy's rig is now ready to be assembled!

Posterior appreciation

The second Christmas pic is taking a bit longer than I'd anticipated - it only needs shading, but I'd planned on spending the next week finalizing Daisy's rig. Also the third Christmas pick still needs to be drawn...

In the meantime, here's a fun little idea that came about from a discussion on Discord, which I may have to save for next month.

Lily knows what she wants for Christmas

Nope, no pressure at all!