skin2279
Six-Finger Challenge Revisited
I came across some interesting videos on Tiktok recently. A user with the handle @pterodactyly has six fingers on each hand, in a slightly unusual arrangement. Namely, the opposability in a conventional pentadactylic hand between the thumb and the other fingers is, in her case, transposed to between the thumb together with the second finger, and the rest of the fingers. In other words, she uses her second finger as her “main” thumb, with her actual thumb mostly kind of going along for the ride.
In this video, she responds to a challenge from another hexadactylic user, @doro2601. It is interesting to compare the hands of the two women, side by side. In both cases, it is clear that their hands don’t really have enough muscles to operate all the fingers individually. At about the 9.5-second mark, @doro2601 (on the right) has trouble extending her fourth finger while keeping the fifth curled; she has to keep the latter restrained under her hand. Conversely, right near the start at about the 5.5-second mark, @pterodactyly (on the left) clearly cannot extend her thumb (without restraint) without also extending her second finger, the one she uses as a functional thumb.
It may be fun to have extra body parts, but having control over them is another matter entirely...
Flash Player Alternatives
While Adobe Flash Player is reaching its end of life in just a couple of months, that doesn’t mean the Flash format itself is dead. As long as DeviantArt doesn’t allow free accounts to use proper video formats, it is worth looking at the feasibility of continuing to upload animations in Flash format.
For myself, I have never used any Adobe products for creating my Flash animations. Instead, I use FFmpeg, which also includes a player that can play these animations, once they have been downloaded. An alternative player is Gnash, from the GNU project. I believe this also offers a browser plugin, or used to.
Or, of course, one could start posting animations on another site. YouTube is popular, but currently I prefer Vimeo, because they seem to have a relaxed attitude to my kind of content, and also because, like DeviantArt, they allow you to re-upload revisions to your artworks.
Bugger The Llamas
Oh, and faves would be nice too.
Moar Shadows Plz
I've lost count of the number of 3D renders I've seen with flat, uniform lighting; where it seems the artist thought that shadows were something to be applied sparingly and subtly, if at all.
Wrong!
Just look around you. Real-world lighting is full of variations of light and shade. Even on the sunniest day, there will be dark corners. The closest you can get to uniform lighting might be outdoors on a completely overcast day. Even indoor lighting is almost never that uniform.
The trouble with uniform lighting is that it makes the picture look like a collage or something photoshopped from pieces laid flat on top of each other—just an assemblage of two-dimensional layers. Whereas highlights and shadows give a real sense of extent and placement of objects in three dimensions: not only do lighting variations make the image more realistic, they also make it more interesting and dramatic.
Of course, you may not want parts of your image to disappear into extreme overexposed whites and gloomy blacks. This is where careful placement of lights comes in. Putting your main light source at an angle to the camera means the shadows it casts becomes a part of the visible image. But adding a lower-intensity fill light at the position, and facing in the direction, of the camera, will make sure that those shadowed parts of the scene do not disappear completely into inky gloom.
If you've seen footage of professional outdoor daytime photo shoots taking place, you will notice that even there they add a "fill light", in the form of a panel covered in reflective foil to bounce some sunlight off the darker parts of the scene. In 3D modelling you don't have to worry about such complicated techniques, you can just put in another light in addition to the light representing the Sun.
In summary: don't be stingy with the shadows! Lay them on a bit more liberally, and watch your images jump to life.