Wildsided

To quote a famous London market trader. "Lovely jubbly, innit,"

That seems like a decent work around. Not ideal but better than faffing with multiple renders and compositing.

Progress has been made on the new project. Tech and Dan are now fully modelled and can blink, wink both eyes individually and have a full set of pose controlled phonemes. The girl on the left is the avatar of YouTuber Geminitay who makes videos on a group server called Hermitcraft. She will not be appearing in the new project, I'm using her as an experiment to see how well the mouth I've made will fit into a skin in that style. A lot of female Minecraft skins use this style of having the eyes low down on the head and it doesn't leave much room for a mouth. Not that it matters as Minecraft characters don't usually have mouths. So I am planning on installing a mouth and seeing how it looks in practice.

Lol, sorry John I misunderstood, I thought you meant in real life!

On the topic of what I would like to drive it would be a replica of the Hardy Boys' Van from The 70's Hardy Boys & Nancy Drew Mysteries, but it would be a modified custom shell for a Smart Car like the VW Smart Van in the picture only a Smart Vandura (Would have to have the little round bubble window in the back, it's a deal breaker).

Been thinking about possibly making YouTube videos again. If I did they would be Minecraft based. So I took some time and modded Tech into Mineraft. But I also wanted to be able to add in animated cutaways so I have also modelled and Rigged my avatar and Tech within A:M. Minecraft uses a dual layer system for its skins. The outer layer gives more depth to the avatar but only consists of a slightly enlarged duplicate of the inner layer which has no thickness so from it looks odd from some angles. For the models I'll be using in the cutaways I've added thickness to the outer layer to give it depth and consistancy while keeping the overall look of the game.

C'mon John, you know I can't resist a pun and the potential for silliness. Quack Commando, I regret nothing.

He's coming along. His design has always had eyebrows, just for some reason I never added them to his original puppet or 3d model.

Cheers for the suggestion Robert. I managed to get him mostly flattened. He looks like an Eldritch Abomination or now I'm thinking about it he looks a bit like what the Jokers' face looks like after he slices it off and wears it as a mask in Batman - Death of the family (Don't quote me on that title). Hopefully have something to show soon.

Decided to start remaking my buddy, Tech. Unwrapping him is not going to be any fun.

Happy Birthday Robert!

Well it would be rude not to.

My medal from the Planes, Trains & Automobiles contest came in the post today. Thank you very much. It's The only physical medal/trophy I've ever won.

It's not unsafe it's 'unknown'. Windows Smart screen flags anything that's not in its database or that's rarely used/seen as potentially unsafe.

Glad to be of service. So, the whole point of making the Ursa model was because I wanted to release a free short story on Kindle for Christmas. Sadly it turns out that you can't release a free ebook on Kindle (There is a way that involves releasing through another website for free, then releasing it on kindle for 0.99 cents and telling Amazon that it's free elsewhere so they price match but it takes weeks and isn't guaranteed). So instead I converted the finished ebook into images and released it as a series of pictures on my Facebook Author Page. If you fancy giving it a read (and maybe a cheeky follow) the page is https://www.facebook.com/DanielFSkeltonauthor/ If not the cover looks like this.

Thanks Robert. Good to know I can turn multipass on as a workaround. Saves me rendering it twice with and without glow and compositing the 2 together or adding the glow separately in Photoshop.

Would this work? It's 2 models, both boxes. One has a hair material, the other has a group set to glow. Put both in same chor and rendered. Hair glows. Glow Hair.prj

Just for the sake of argument, I pulled in the bernie model that also uses hair (separate materials to Ursa's hair) and they glow too, even though the star in the staff is the only thing that is set to glow. I also tried removing the staff and inserting a generic cube which was set to glow and got the same result. If I remove the objects with the glow property then the fur doesn't glow. It seems that if anything is set to glow then any hair particles are made to glow as well.

Same thing. This is a new chor, seperate models with no constraints.

The staff (which contains the only part with glow turned on) is a separate model brought in as an action object.

Done some more work on Ursa. Finished rigging his cloak (except the hood) and added his staff (The staff of the north). I set the star fragments in the end of the staff to glow and tried to do a render. But for some reason, even though the star is the only thing in the scene set to glow, A:M is making the fur trim of the cloak glow as well. I even went into the surface settings of the fur and set glow to off, and the group that the fur material is assigned to and set it's glow property to off and the fur is still glowing. Think it might be a bug.

Looks great, Gerald and yes, I know exactly what you mean.

Thanks for the support guys. I have got Ursa's body rigged and threw together a walk cycle to test it out. Still need to rig his cloak and hood. Magika walk cycle.mp4

Now the book is out I need to promote it and for Christmas I wanted to make some festive artwork to post on social media. Naturally the first thing that comes to mind is Santa Claus, but then it dawned on me that Santa and for that matter Christmas, wouldn't exist in Bernie's world. So I needed to create a holiday and its mascot to fill the roll. Anyway long story that you're probably not interested in short. I created a Santa-esque character called Ursa Magika. He isn't textured yet and the colours aren't final but I figured I'd post what I've got done so far.