#xan learns blender

[xandezsims]

Howdy! Not dead, just mad with power (and sick). : ) Dez and I designed a neat little cabinet desk. Just to see if we could. Just gotta figure out some swatches.

[golem-boy]

DevLog 02: I'd Rather Be Writing CSS

Hello again! This month's DevLog post is going to be a lot of fun. I'm going to talk a little about my endeavors with Neocities, writing code, and working with old-school web interaction.

I also wanted to make a note that I'm totally cool with folks reblogging and liking these posts, and you're welcome to snag the rss feed for this tag if you'd like to keep up with it but don't particularly feel like wading through everything else I drop here.

Without further ado--

Lately I've been working on a side project to help a friend out; their Neocities, is--like mine--going to be a place to host a ton of centralized information so they can just hand site links out rather than having to link a whole array of webpages to people in order to share certain stuff. (I totally recommend people do this, btw. Super useful, AND you get to learn html/css, which is great on a site like Tumblr, where you can employ that knowledge and skillset elsewhere!)

Thing is, when I started this, I'd been... a touch rusty on things like... you know, the basics, building from a blank space up into a proper site. One of my problems was accidentally adding a period before the 'body' stylization code in the css document, which, for those wondering, makes the css read it as a 'div' or 'span' tag, rather than a core component of the site. Rookie mistake, but I did manage to figure it out... by making links turn orange on hover!

How, you may ask? It confirmed that the style from the css was successfully applying to the barebones html I'd already written, and gave me a better idea of what exactly was going wrong. Never discount the odd ways of troubleshooting, tbh.

I've also made a huge leap of progress on my own site, specifically the gallery pages, though they are DEFINITELY still works in progress, namely in layout. I've had to expand my understanding a litle and read up on stuff like flex boxes, which I might expand on and cover in my next DevLog as I make more progress.

I also started sketching some ideas with a friend out for a sort of idle colony sim--I don't want to spoil too much, but our shared notes are preeetty exciting so far!

On the topic of games, Garry's Mod is kind of a wreck on linux. I managed to get it going fine with Proton 9.x, which is hilarious--it straight up does not run anymore on the native build. No idea what got broken, but it sure is Something to behold, hah. I have been wading through my subscribed items, trying to update some of the tools and utilities. One of these days I'll get my shit figured out and upload a UT99 playstation-port Xan... I already have a lot of plans for such a thing, of course.

I have been honing my skills with blender, especially rigging, which has been interesting. I definitely GET it, it's just a matter of synthesizing and memorizing parts of the control scheme and especially how to fiddle with things like shapekeys. The perk of ragdoll stuff is you don't need a ton of picky shit... phew! Getting ahead of myself a bit there.

This month has been super busy, and I've been a bit scatterbrained, but here's to another month of progress, eh?

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[feralpoodles]

Howdy! Xan here. I need help and I feel like you may know the answer. I was updating swatches on an outdated hair I liked, only to find a bunch of problems with the mesh. It's not only got no hat chops, which I'll have to learn to do to fix it--but LOD 0 and 1 are both 21K poly. For a Maxis Match hair, that's kind of insane? The creator is way gone. Any tips for a newbie on how to reduce that without destroying the mesh? Thanks. :3

Hey!! For hat chops, not many tutorials are made for versions past 2.79, this post has an ok tutorial for new blender but it does some funky stuff that seems unnecessarily confusing, you might be better off following a tutorial like this one and just figuring out where the corresponding tools/buttons are in new blender. I have a new method that I've been using that uses the shrinkwrap modifier and vertex groups but I think it's too much to explain in text, maybe I can make a video tutorial on it if there's interest :) For the polycount it's kind of difficult to give advice without seeing the hair, for some hairs it's ok to decimate it a little without it getting too crunchy but other's you'd have to manually reduce the polys by dissolving edge loops. BUT tbh 21k is actually not that bad, it's definitely at the highest end of the acceptable spectrum, but I wouldn't say it's completely unusable, I've made hairs that were 17k polys before. It's definitely bad that the LOD 1 is also 21k though, I would use my instant LOD script on it

[cravitus426]

in an age before halo and the power of the magnum, and in a world where doom’s pistol was still made of suck, there was the automag

there was also the enforcer which happens to be my favorite pistol ever

i got bored on monday and modeled it over six hours of illness and mike stoklasa noises, using the PS2 concept art render promo thing as my ref and taking a few liberties based on personal tastes and the ingame models

i did get lazy on the backslide (perfect spot for an ammo counter though) and i do have more work to do like doing my own textures instead of projecting the ref, learning what baking is, doing lowpoly, etc, but i love it as is

i swear this thing is like the perfect blend of pulse rifle and boltpistol, hits the 90s chunkiness with industrial military meats in a way that i feel none of the replacements ever did (and still haven’t)

modeled in blender, currently around 10,400 tris

stuff to do:

backslide details, magazine polishing, texture polishing/replacing, lowpoly considerations, sleep and pass classes, beat xan on godlike

[xandezsims]

Expectation > Reality

[xandezsims]

Y'all. I'm playing with Blender again.

[xandezsims]

You know what? Adults deserve bad costumes too.

[xandezsims]

This fcking dress, again...

Update: So, apparently the underside of the skirt is screwed up, did something wrong there, and the weight paint is botched. I regret even trying, but I'm committed now. Any suggestions?

[xandezsims]

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Howdy! We're Xan (he/they) and Dez (she/her), a nerdy couple who make cc, tell stories, and do builds. Our genres vary between goth, horror, sci-fi and fantasy/semi-historical. We're queer, and WCIFF, and everything we post is free.

Be aware that if you talk to or about our characters, there is a chance they will talk back. Usually because it's fun.

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[xandezsims]

Y'all, there might be a God

Expectation > Reality