slepyhed1

I finally got the video done that I had promised a long time ago. It is uploading right now and will live at this address:
[link]
I haven't made any videos in a while, so it was actually a lot of work to figure out how to do it again! Now that I've worked out all my video creation troubles, I can make more videos easily. Maybe I'll do some animating? Probably not, that takes a lot of rendering!

There are a lot of topics I didn't get to go over in the video because it was getting kinda long, so I may have to make a followup. I do read comments and take those into account when I make videos, so suggestions are welcome.

At long last, I finally finished the Elven Epic. I even went back and improved a few of the earliest parts so that the whole thing is more consistent. This project really got out of hand, so now I'm looking forward to working on something new.

I'm going to start making the video of how I modified Manuel Bastioni Lab. I'll post a note when its ready.

I did it. Adding a pre-defined vertex group for hair was very easy. Adding eye bones (so you can pose the eyeballs) was considerably more complicated. I had to delve into the code to understand how the data files were used. I also had to determine what to add into the data files! I found that adding more bones is really easy. I also discovered that adding or taking away vertices can require an enormous amount of work to re-generate new data files.

MBLab is a terrific addon for blender that lets you easily create a wide variety of characters. There are just a few very minor things about it that have kept me from using it as much as I'd like. For example, you have to start from scratch when adding hair. There are no bones for posing eyeballs, jaw, etc. 

Well, I've spent some time examining the code and figuring out how it works. It turns out that there are just 4 base models and everything is morphed from there. The base models are in a blender file! So all I need to do is go into the base model file, make my additions there, and all my new characters will have what I want! So far I have added a scalp vertex group that I can use to add hair.

I'm pretty excited about all this. I might make a video tutorial to show how to make these changes, and maybe post an updated blend file somewhere.

Today I spent some time learning about how to use shape keys for animation. Now I can animate facial expressions.

I also started a space monster model last night. Maybe we will soon see an animated space monster!