Matt Castle does some stuff

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  • Matt_CastleMatt_Castle Posts: 2,299

    For whatever reason, I got it in my head I wanted to render the Lindy Hop, then ended up with a particularly weird combination of my characters for the job.


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  • WinterMoonWinterMoon Posts: 1,893

    Matt_Castle said:

     I wanted to render the Lindy Hop, then ended up with a particularly weird combination of my characters for the job.

    But they're wearing sensible shoes! laugh I love it!

  • Matt_CastleMatt_Castle Posts: 2,299

    WinterMoon said:

    But they're wearing sensible shoes! laugh I love it!

    My characters almost always wear sensible shoes - Athena (the AI) very much so, because she weighs 274 kg (~600 lbs) and is already 190cm (6' 3").

    One of the sales I went maddest in was a wide discount on shoe products - or rather, things that were *specifically* shoes, rather the stuff that comes rolled into a lot of outfits (frequently high-heels). Many sensible boots and training shoes were bought.

  • Matt_CastleMatt_Castle Posts: 2,299

    I'm being weird again.

    ~~~~~

    Knitting:

    Even powerful arachne sorceresses need a hobby.


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  • WinterMoonWinterMoon Posts: 1,893
    edited January 2022

    Matt_Castle said: Even powerful arachne sorceresses need a hobby.

    Of course! And with that many feet to keep warm, it's neat to be able to knit your own socks! Does she make her own yarn?!? 

    Post edited by WinterMoon on
  • GordigGordig Posts: 9,024

    WinterMoon said:

    Matt_Castle said: Even powerful arachne sorceresses need a hobby.

    Does she make her own yarn?!? 

    I'm not sure if the stickiness of spider silk would make it a terrible knitting material, or a fantastic one.

  • Matt_CastleMatt_Castle Posts: 2,299

    One might suppose that she does on occasion. Spiders can create different silks for different uses - some sticky, some elastic, some cushioning, some strong - with some species having as many as seven different silks (as compared to insects, which usually have only one).

    That said, as some of those spider silks make steel or kevlar look weak, the question may be how often you need a bulletproof sweater!

    ~~~~~

    Anyway, there may have been a stupid conversation on Discord, followed by a quick half hour in Blender to make a cowl...

    Harley H. Harrow:


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    (Harley's an older model, but he checks out. Definitely one of my favourite of the teddy bears on the store - and I think I have most of them...)

  • Matt_CastleMatt_Castle Posts: 2,299
    edited January 2022

    This is more of a test than a finished piece, but I think I've finally worked out a method for transferring Horse 2 assets to the centaurs that A) preserves the original rigging and B) isn't a complete pain in the butt. (Still a *bit* of a pain, but not a complete one).

    This was a fairly simple test (relatively little interaction with the neck area of the horse, but had some of its own bones that would need their own rigging preserved).

    I'm not sure I'm actually going to make much use of this knowledge, but I do now have it.

    Post edited by Matt_Castle on
  • Matt_CastleMatt_Castle Posts: 2,299
    edited March 2022

    Someone's probably going to tell me I don't know how to football, and they would be quite right.

    But hey, I had fun.

    Following failure to find a better football uniform, this is a G8F* conversion of the old Rugby Uniform for G3M, where I exported and decimated the geometry in Blender to make it more suitable for dForce

    * All the figures here are G8F - in the relative absense of G8M teens, I've had more success masculinising G8F teens than trying to age down G8M characters.


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  • Matt_CastleMatt_Castle Posts: 2,299
    edited March 2022

    The #GrisSwimsuit is a trend that's been running on Twitter for the last week or two, involving people drawing their characters in a mostly transparent one-piece swimsuit. I thought it'd be something simple to practice modelling in Blender, so I did.

    I'm happy to say I think I'm getting better at this, as I've managed to make it both dForce (to help it fit around the chest area) while retaining solid geometry for the refractive shading.

    Whisky, however, is less interested in that, and more in how all the other characters were managing to keep theirs in place.


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    ~~~~~

    And another one I've also finished up:

    ~~~~~

    Werewolves occasionally have anger problems. Emma doesn't stand for such things in her pub, and is quite willing to remind rowdy patrons that her near two-millennia on this earth have not made her a push-over.


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    Post edited by Matt_Castle on
  • Yeah, I don't understand how many people keep those strapless things in place when there's no real underpinnings to give it some structure and foundation.

  • GordigGordig Posts: 9,024

    Matt_Castle said:

    This is more of a test than a finished piece, but I think I've finally worked out a method for transferring Horse 2 assets to the centaurs that A) preserves the original rigging and B) isn't a complete pain in the butt. (Still a *bit* of a pain, but not a complete one).

    This was a fairly simple test (relatively little interaction with the neck area of the horse, but had some of its own bones that would need their own rigging preserved).

    I'm not sure I'm actually going to make much use of this knowledge, but I do now have it.

    Care to share that knowledge?

  • Matt_CastleMatt_Castle Posts: 2,299

    This one comes from having replayed Timesplitters Future Perfect a while back:


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    Gordig said:

    Care to share that knowledge?

    I've got a morph/pose/scale slider that adapts Horse 2 to closely match the centaur. (These are my own work, so are theoretically shareable). From there, that shape can be baked into the Horse clothing.

    The problem is that while the weight maps for Horse 2 and the centaur are very similar, the bones are differently named and ordered, and doing those swaps with DS's internal tools is a pain.

    So I've managed to formulate a strategy that lets me export an FBX to Blender, reorder/name the bones there, then reimport via the MikuMikuDance importer that was made some time ago. The problem is that the MMD formats may preserve most of the rigging (unlike the mess that rigged FBX files turn into), but destroy the vertex order by triangulating everything. However the transfer utility can be used to copy it back over to an original mesh, and then a rigging transfer from the centaur gets all the bone orientations that the MMD format has lost.

    It's still not a *pretty* method, but it's not the method that it was with DS's own editing tools where one single tiny mistake in how you copied or parented something ruined the whole thing and forced you to start over.

    TL;DR: I morph it, and now have a method that lets me export the rigging to and from Blender largely intact.

     

  • WinterMoonWinterMoon Posts: 1,893

    Oh no, swimming in a plastic suit? I don't know why, but the thought of that icks me way too much. It's also going to just fill up with water, and you may get jelly fish tentacles (or a whole small jelly fish) trapped in it. If you're proud of your abs, there are bikinis. x)

    I love the football renders, but I can't football very well either. Last time I played a (drunk) game of footie, I mainly ran around shouting "I'm not scared of you!" at the big guys, and then I ran away because I was. At least we weren't starting bar trouble!

     

  • Matt_CastleMatt_Castle Posts: 2,299

    WinterMoon said:

    Oh no, swimming in a plastic suit? I don't know why, but the thought of that icks me way too much. It's also going to just fill up with water.

    I don't think it's a very practical swimsuit, no! It was part of a meme/viral thread on Twitter, and things don't usually go viral for being ordinary or sensible.

    I was most interested in it from the technical perspective of practicing my modelling skills and seeing whether I could pull off a dForce mesh that had thickness (necessary for proper refraction) without it collapsing. Which, apparently, I can!

    ~~~~~

    I've actually done quite a lot recently, but I'm going to have to catch up on uploading them to the Daz Gallery. I try to flesh out the product listings for the sake of helping out people who use the Daz Deals plug-in to see what others have done with products (a feature that's often helped convince me on products, or introduce me to new ones), but that's going to take a while to fill those out.

    Anyway, this one was done for the Daz Slackers Discord's weekly challenge a few weeks ago, on the brief "Light and Shadow":


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  • Matt_CastleMatt_Castle Posts: 2,299
    edited February 2022

    Uploading out of order, because I can more clearly remember what assets are in the newer scenes in order to tag stuff in the gallery...

    Point:


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    Post edited by Matt_Castle on
  • Matt_CastleMatt_Castle Posts: 2,299

    Apparently I still find centaurs doing people things funny. (It also comes with a big disclaimer that I've made custom JCMs for my centaurs that massively increase their range of motion at the waist, before I cause anyone to waste their time experimenting).

    This was done for the "Spring Cleaning" theme on the Daz Slackers Discord's weekly challenges:


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  • Matt_CastleMatt_Castle Posts: 2,299

    Catching up on a load of renders I don't think I've uploaded here yet:

    ~~~~~

    Betterment

    Done for the Daz Slackers Discord's weekly challenge/suggestion of "Journey". While elves all have a natural tendency for good physical performance, Whisky is very much learning that she's still got some work to do if she wants to keep up with her daughters.


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    Break

    This was done for the Daz Slackers Discord's weekly challenge/suggestion of "Break Free". I may have focused more on the "Break" than the "Free"., but hey, I guess he's free to go home now...


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    Buck
    School playground fights get a bit weird in the world of Veil...

    (This is exploring the earlier friendship of a couple of my characters - Rina and Jennifer, the centaur and succubus respectively).

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    Homework
    After all the normal stuff, like centaurs and prototype combat AIs, I thought I'd render something truly fantastical - a teenager actually doing homework.


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  • Matt_CastleMatt_Castle Posts: 2,299

    Go Green:

    Done for the Daz Slackers weekly challenge on the theme of "Go Green". (It was St Patrick's Day last week)

    The leaps in computing and robotics technology that lead to the development of sapient and embodied AIs has had some knock-on effects, although not as large as futurists had hoped or anticipated; many industrialists positioned themselves to resist changes that would have devalued their industries, and AIs remain a small sub-sect of society who have to tiptoe around those who court more traditional viewpoints.

    One area in which progress was made was in the proliferation of electric vehicles, benefitting from the development of newer and more advanced battery technologies; as of 2018, fully electric vehicles have become the most common "fuel" type for newly registered vehicles in the UK (outselling petrol, diesel, and various hybrid vehicles combined), although the large number of existing combustion engined vehicles already on the road mean it will still be a good many more years before they become a majority of vehicles in actual use.

    One problem that's some way from being solved is the uncanny ability for any power cord to inevitably become caught on something.


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    ~~~~~

    Kettle:

    I only pick the most thrilling of render subjects.


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  • Matt_CastleMatt_Castle Posts: 2,299

    Mothers

    It was Mother's Day in the UK, so I decided to do something maternally themed. (The UK has Mother's Day on the fourth Sunday in Lent, in contrast to it being the second Sunday in May in many other countries).

    In any case, I've not put Athena's mother Alice in a render for a while, so here she is being picked up by her daughter. And while Sarah has been in renders more recently, you also get Molly doing a much worse job of trying to pick her mother up.


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  • WinterMoonWinterMoon Posts: 1,893

    heartheartheartheart

  • Matt_CastleMatt_Castle Posts: 2,299

    Catching up with a few uploads:

    Cabaret
    Done for the "Daz Slackers" Discord's weekly challenge on the theme of "Cabaret".
    After rejecting a couple of initial ideas, I decided to go with dressing one of my characters up as Jessica Rabbit, and Whisky was the most obvious choice of my cast.

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    Folly
    Done for the Daz Slackers Discord's weekly challenge, on the theme of "April's Folly" (as that week was ending 1st April), and because it's a pretty loose prompt, I decided to just run with the "folly" part.
    So I ended up doing a scene with an architectural folly in the background as a follow-up to the Mother's Day render I did the week before, particularly as it gave me a chance to play with UltraScenery XT.

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    Overlook
    I like doing complicated hug poses.


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  • Matt_CastleMatt_Castle Posts: 2,299

    Range

    Mark and Molly spending some father/daughter time together.


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  • Matt_CastleMatt_Castle Posts: 2,299

    Following an extremely poorly spent evening, I seem to now have a workflow to fit G8F assets to the centaur.


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  • Matt_CastleMatt_Castle Posts: 2,299

    I may have been having more fun fitting clothes to things they're not supposed to be.

    Hugs


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  • Matt_CastleMatt_Castle Posts: 2,299

    I decided I wanted to something with Ruby


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  • Matt_CastleMatt_Castle Posts: 2,299

    Described by critics as "Haunting" and "Overwhelming", tonight these two young women shall become intimately familiar with the unfathomable twisted horrors of The Dark Behind...

    ...the television, trying to work out why the bloody thing isn't registering the Blu-ray player.

    Movie night isn't off to a great start. Probably should have just streamed it instead.

    ~~~~~

    christine13black was very insistent that my entry for this week's challenge on the Daz Slackers Discord (on the theme of "The Dark Behind") had to somehow parody her entry, so I nicked hers* and made it into a DVD box.
    *I have checked with her; she's okay with it.

    Maybe Jennifer and Rina will even get to watch it, if they can work out which is the right HDMI cable.


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  • Matt_CastleMatt_Castle Posts: 2,299

    Vwom vwom... vwooommmm


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  • Matt_CastleMatt_Castle Posts: 2,299

    I was in one of my "fit clothes to a centaur" moods again, this time https://www.daz3d.com/gamer-girl-pjs-and-accessories-for-genesis-8-females and the socks from https://www.daz3d.com/zk-dforce-temptress-outfit-for-genesis-8-females textured to match.


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  • Matt_CastleMatt_Castle Posts: 2,299

    Suffice to say that this one gave my VRAM a bit of a workout (3060 12 GB), even exploiting Nvidia's feature to let me shove all of DS's OpenGL rendering onto my secondary 1650, but it was eventually all rendered in one pass.

    Vivid Imagination


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