Is it procrastinating? I mean, I haven’t drawn anything in days. I’ve been looking into fluid simulation and deciding it’s a computationally intensive waste of time for this project. (Also the fluid keeps exploding unpredictably.)
I’m looking into OSL now via the excellent eBook Open Shading Language for Blender and it’s got some promise. I mean, look at this nifty demoscener cube:
That’s pretty cool. Not even that many lines of code. I look at stuff like GLSL Sandbox and Shadertoy and wonder if I can pull any of that off in Blender.
But the characters, man. The characters are waiting. And other environmental concept art and whatnot. Mucking around with the technology for days on end makes me wonder if I’m purposefully avoiding the work of drawing. Really, character design is like solving any other problem: I need to be available and ready to work on it. But I’m really resisting it. I am consistently running out of time in the evenings to sit down, get pens and draw stuff. Or consistently running the time out, perhaps.
Today it was a movie. Yesterday and all weekend it was experimenting with fluid simulation. I’ve lost count of how many pages I owe my concept art book with the goal of doing one or two a day.
Still, the hypnocube is pretty cool. I like the hypnocube. I like OSL. Lots of potential. Maybe I can try porting something simple from GLSL to OSL as an exercise.
Oh also, cool tip for the day: typing #frame into many attribute boxes in Blender makes that attribute follow the frame number via driver. Very useful to type it into Cycles Seed value to jitter up the noise pattern from frame to frame. Cheers to hjaarnio on Freenode #blender for that one. 🙂