Happy New Year!
I know I could have spent some time making a New Year image, but I need to do character development to carry forward so that won.
You may remember Flotsam & Jetsam, former Cerberus pups twins from the last time Akashik ran. They were going to be a fun pair, but do you know I never knew just who was Flotsam and who was Jetsam.
Flotsam is now the female twin. She is no longer in Cerberus. In fact, she’s no longer an Annannagi. She’s human now, and quite happy with it. And much younger.
The bulk of her development was creating that hair prop she’s wearing. I didn’t create it from scratch. I have hair parts from kits that are meant to assemble new styles with. I put them together, created a new obj from that, and gave it rigging. I’ve discovered since doing that with Taus’s hair, I struggle a lot less with draping hair etc.. Something about the hair being a single object with a skeleton as opposed to various bits put together makes the process more agreeable, which means faster image production.
I’d originally started recreating bits and bobs because of a new thing DAZ put out. This will be good in the long run. I love working with DAZ, and I have the tooning down to a real art. But DAZ is neglecting the render engine required to create the toon images. I’ve plead with people for answers. I’ve been blown off by render snobs here, and DAZ… isn’t exactly helpful there. So I’m looking at Maya, which is what’s used in part to make The Dragon Prince. The shaders for the look may not be available to me, as they’re a commercial product, but that’s okay because the learning curve to go from one to the other is so steep it might be years before I can switch.
It already took years to get Akashik back running again. Soooooo…. one thing at a time. No intentions to derail found here. Plus Maya is a highway robbery program. If I can get my hands on a 2018 copy, or 2016, that would work. Anyhoo. Meet Flotsam.