R'n'D rabbit hole post

I've been working more fluids for the glamor hole animation, and while waiting between baking and testing fluids, I've been exploring some different things. I've mentioned before about using AI to generate variations on images to help exploring designs for character heads (which I still have been dying to do a video on, explaining my evolving approach to it) but seeing all these cool, strange and nonsensical variations on designs has made me start thinking about how I can take my work to the next level.

For example, in the background, I'll try and think about how I can redesign the dragon's head to be more appealing. I think where it's at now is *fine* but I think it's lacking a special something... like it seems amateurish.

What better way to use AI than to give something, have it just make a bunch of variations, and then pick some from dozens (almost a hundred? idk it's a lot of them) of variations that have cool ideas. What I've been doing is using what I've named a DUBI board (The desired, unusable, inspiring, boring board. Yes it's a dumb name but that's 100% intentional). The point is to narrow the variations down into ones that are good in different ways.

Inspiring are variations that have cool ideas about them, something that's different in ways that could be appealing.

Desired are variations that align closely to what you would kind of want from the AI.

Unusable are variations that just... aren't a good fit or are terrific disasters, unique in ways that you might find something cool in.

Boring are variations that... aren't exciting, but aren't totally awful.

This is still WIP (the hair is pretty much still the old hair, but I'd like to explore something new, even if it ends up being a failure). I think this is on to something better, but I'm trying not to be committed to it.

Let me know what you think of the dragon head please! I'll be doing a poll on it eventually, but I'm not jumping all-in on a dragon head redesign yet. I want to have the glamor hole animation done, that way the temptation to redo it all with a new head isn't there >_>

I've also been thinking about this AI generated pig from Dall-E.

Like, I love the smug energy this guy has (and the horn!). I was thinking about it trying to sleep a couple nights ago, and I couldn't sleep because I really wanted to bring him to life in 3d... So I did! This is far different than my usual style, obviously it's more "popular  3d animation studio" style. But I thought it would be fun and I could learn some useful stuff from trying to make him.

I couldn't quite make the eyes like in the AI's vision- but I did my best to make it work! I also gave him a bulge.

Another pig poster! I gave him some chest/armpit/chin hair to make him look less young... another thing, I used the Cycles render engine for this poster, since you can get that wonderful global illumination and really good subsurface scattering this way. But that kind of got me thinking... maybe I should just switch to using Cycles instead of Eevee? You can get such amazingly delectable surfaces, it's much more organic and less shiny/video-gamey.

(also been working on a model based on a pink horse that me and stable diffusion came up with)

This is the result of a few iterations between me and SD, more info here:

https://twitter.com/velocirection/status/1568487787560566787

Also, while starting to rig this horse, I tried a different approach to the eyes. I usually make my eye lids using individual bones for each vertex, where one bone controls one vertex. But I've never liked doing it this way because it's hard to work with when posing. I had an idea, using a mesh deform modifier as a deformation cage- this is using some shape keys to make eye shapes.

"Why not use shape keys on the horses' mesh?" There's several reasons. You can't apply modifiers with shape keys for one thing (you'll never know when you'll want to do that) Plus, you can use a simpler deformation cage- it doesn't have to match the topology!

I do plan on exploring this method for facial rigging further, to get better expressions and also make it easier to pose things on the face. I think I can do cheeks, eye brows, ears, lips, nose this way...

I thought a nice big fat male symbol would look great on him. Still nee to figure out what to do for hair, I might use Blender's new hair system for this as opposed to my curve based/polygon hair approach I've been doing up until now. Anyway everything here is WIP, experimental, etc... Sometimes you should take some time to do something different that might fail or lead nowhere, because what you might discover along the way. Next post will be more lewd update stuff.