Day 5 - Just keep swimming

To-do list items multiply when you cross them off. I'm not imagining this right? Wow.

Well, since the last log we've managed to get our zombieboy character completed as you can see in the image attached. The main struggles from a design perspective were absolutely not in creating the character itself but more so with baking the textures and the behavior of the clothes when animating. Textures have been a thorn in my side ever since day 1 of this adventure. 

Although I've learned loads, I still find new ways in which texturing behaves in ways I don't understand. For example - Baking the shirt texture onto an image provided me with an outcome that had black artifacts all over it, why? I still don't know. I decided to move forward and handpainted the textures instead of applying the procedural shader I had set up.  That worked fine.

Then came the animating part. Something that I've invested more time in learning than any other specific skill in blender before this jam started. By no means does that indicate I'm an expert, far far from that. But I'd at least be confident as to what button to press at which point in time.. Great. Now one thing I had not done before is animate a character with clothes, and therein lies the problem. Body parts were poking out through the clothes with every movement you can imagine! This was unacceptable. I've spent a lot of time trying to resolve this, as I thought it was related to weight painting. In the end it turns out that the polygon count/composition of the clothes was too different from the actual body mesh and that was always going to cause distortion. End result - the clothes that I had spent loads of time on (lasso mask tool,  solidify modifier, multires, careful sculpting).. well, I had to redo them (duplicate body mesh, delete unwanted vertices, go.).  

It looks less polished, but the animations do not come out weird. I've definitely learned a thing or 2 struggling with this and I've realized that I'd very much like to follow a proper complete character course that includes clothing/attributes/props on the mesh body because this appears to be more complex than I initially thought.

Right - that's a whole lot of text about me struggling with the character design. Apart from that we've completed the first set of Icons for the UI as well as some menu frames and backdrop imagery. I kind of had to because Lewl on the other side of things is going through his to-do list like it's nothing. Appears his items don't multiply like mine do! 

Final stretch, let's go! Very eager to see where everyone else is at in terms of design, but there's no time for that right now!

Leroy a.k.a. S4ZZ1, out