It’s been a period of time. Two people I know have died recently from two different cancers, another has been diagnosed with yet another type of cancer, I think I did get my yearly chest infection but at least it only lasted for a day this time. I’ve had to fill in at work a bit for various reasons which ate into project work time and also had a few things happening around the house (youngest got a new bed which required rearranging his entire room which is still in progress and there is furniture everywhere and I cracked it and attempted a deep clean of the computer room and only got it half done as I started late and didn’t finish and have yet to resume) which…also ate into project work time.

Four years ago (x_x) I made this piece: Protective is actually 2 and the original Protective was badly drawn in a uni notebook a hundred million years ago Earlier this year I decided to “continue” this slightly older video There I was doing cloth sim, hair dynamics I think and also testing out this clumsy rig I’d made for the Avian crests. In this one I was purely testing the Dragonkin rig and trying extremely hard not to get distracted with (re)learning cloth sim and seeing if the new hair system could animate yet. I also made it slightly nicer than I normally would because it’s been a while since I animated properly.

It was this version of that song that was on my Spotify that did it. Then it was meant to be a brief interlude but I was trying to avoid cel shading because I hate doing it (I’m just straight up bad at it) but the other colouring styles weren’t working out (honestly it looked fine but not what I wanted) so I guess my brain decided that I needed to work on cel shading (and in some fairness to it I had kind of gone more anime/manga with this, Dak is the only one that would dual wield guns because his cybereyes can link up with his guns).

I got very briefly stuck when I found out that I don’t think I can do a double loop with the tail with five controllers. Firstly there was a lot of keyframe shenanigans which I kind of just did but didn’t really need to stress about that much for a rig test (but I kind of had to do it because I KNOW). I generally avoid frame by frame like the plague but sometimes it’s a thing that has to be done apparently.

Prehensile tails are a pain, why would anyone design a character with them. why do I have pretty much no control over this head-universe Trying to get this tail to wrap neatly has been an interesting experience. I’ve tried going forwards cleaning up everything between keyframes and going backwards from the shapes I wanted to end on and it seems I can break everything whichever way I do it so I’ve kept inching forwards as that seems to break things slightly less.

In my infinite wisdom I decided to stay up late again (to 1am which used to be normal bedtime once upon a time but I have been trying to make bedtime 10-10:30 for two decades x_x) to finish the blocking. So now I’ve been doing more fun stuff like arcing the arcs (so that things don’t just shortest path to the next keyframe like they were doing in the blocking video from the last post)

Blah blah blah the usual. A lot of my projeect work time got overrun by other things that needed to be done. Some of it was kind of unavoidable (like the couple of times a year we do performances, and competitions when they come up). The rest of it was just somehow I ended up being the one that absolutely had to do the thing because for some reason everyone else was completely and utterly incapable.

I spent the first two weeks of March editing a video out of several that I took on and off during an old friends reunion/meetup. It was supposed to be a quick job and in fairness it only took me a day to put together and do the basic editing and a couple of hours , but I had a problem with led flickering and trying to fix that resulted in ghosting in places which required a directly opposing solution and that was what I spent most of the two weeks on.

Same freaking problem. I stayed up way too late and then didn’t end up posting on Muddling Monday because I hyperfocused on trying to kerbstomp it into the ground. The kerbstomping part didn’t happen but I did at least figure out something that worked (at least for now, I don’t know if it will still work later). Anyway I have managed to work out that there’s some problem between Deform and Interpolate. With no modifiers on in viewport, everything is fine and dandy.

There is the usual reason for no progblog since the first one of the year, and that was I got stuck. I needed to comb the hair on the highest multires level (because the render looked completely different to the viewport, which I thought was something to do with hair settings and didn’t realise the levels would make that substantial a difference) and I’m not sure if multires and curve hairs play well together as combing was really quick and easy at level 0 but at level 3 it’s jittery and unpredictable and often moves in at least the opposite if not some random direction (it’s not laggy at all, just unpredictable and makes an already tedious process extremely unnecessarily aggravating). I got really mad and deleted the hair node group modifier thingies I’d put on it earlier and shoved the Surface Deform node back to the top which has helped a bit, as in it’s not jittering randomly or pretending there’s some kind of force field active and it doesn’t keep flying off in random directions instead of going in the direction I’m pushing it.