This week has been thoroughly boring as far as progress goes.  Even the progress I made on roleplaying notes felt pretty meh.

The uv maps were so horribly borked that  I decided I was just going to bite it and redo the sculpt (which is a comparatively easy thing to do).

While I was there I noted that some fixes which I thought I'd done with the base model hadn't actually been done, so decided I would actually do all the fixes on the base model that I was supposed to do, including applying basic textures, which is another thing I thought I'd already done.

_{the title partially comes from when 17yo was a baby and said pretty much that as I think he was trying to figure out the h sound}

I successfully crunched a lot of roleplaying notes and even got a decent start on a couple of major npcs (I only write character sheets for major npcs, everything else gets made up on the fly as I need it) and…game on Sunday didn't happen as one player was working (which we knew about) and the other one had a family thing on (which we found out when we pinged them to let them know we were going to be starting soon). I've since decided to try running that game as play by post on my Discord server, hopefully that will work out better for the people that keep consistently not making it, and also resolves scheduling issues I was having nicely (I can now run my planned weekly game on Sundays seeing as the fortnightly game is getting moved to pbp).

There was drama with my uv maps.  They decided to "helpfully" maximise my uv space by stacking (basically symmetrical things neatly align themselves on top of one another to maximise efficient use of uv space...however because I'm painting the uv maps and there's different things on each side I absolutely do not under any circumstances want that) and I don't know when that happened or how to fix it.

And there were these random little black dots which I think are polygons (because they only show up in polygon selection mode) but are unselectable.  I don't even know if they're actually polygons or glitches in the matrix as they seem to randomly appear and disappear.

After last progblog I decided to break from doing the Avian model and work on the Dragonkin one for a bit. First level of panic was that the proportions were really different.

That calmed down very quickly when I remembered…I only need the wings and everything in that area was proportional enough.

_{I technically do need the tail but I could just pull that one out if the existing one wasn't in the right spot and given the different topology of both models it may end up in a slightly different spot anyway}

Gundry still has not budged.  I was supposed to do more work on him today but I ended up doing other things instead.  I also need to have a chat with my young friend and find out if we're still going along with...well I hesitate to call what we were working off any kind of plan, not even a loose and fluid one if this project is still going to go.

I think/hope I'm getting closer with the particle feather instancing.  Using two feathers (it's still technically one feather, the second one is a linked duplicate) and two vertex groups I've managed to get them to align the way I want, but of course now there's the problem of the shape is not quite right so I have to figure out how to get them to layer correctly.

In that gap was a slightly unexpected new puppy (which I wrote a bit about in the homeschool miscellany) and covid (not worth the ridiculously excessive fuss and the frantic stripping of as much freedom as possible in that space of time that was made of it, wouldn't recommend the headache though). And then there was me figuring it wasn't worth the blog because there hadn't been much prog and trying to manage that and consistently failing as other things kept happening (not least of which comp season started).

After a lot of stuffing around, I eventually worked out there was something either wrong with the file or with the particle system that was making my curve guides not work.  A bit more experimentation later I found that recreating the particle system worked, and that NURBs paths no longer seemed to work but Beziers did.

15yo and I decided we desperately needed a shoe rack so after dropping 17yo at TAFE we headed over to the KMart down the road and got a bamboo one.

It didn't end up getting put together til later that day and 15yo did most of it on her own but was struggling with a bit of it, and 17yo happened to be on his way to or from the kitchen, noticed and leant assistance.

The cat was "helping" too.

It came together nicely and is now by the door doing an amazing job.

_{it's so much easier to sweep the corridor now as I just have to sweep under the shoe rack rather than moving a lot of shoes around}

Precious little got done over the last week on anything as I discovered a fatal flaw in my scheduling. I have roleplaying stuff scheduled for most of the weekend (currently only playing every other Sunday so I just use the time for extra prep and generally failing to catch up with all the writeups I haven't done yet, am starting up a new weekly game with my three regulars next weekend though). After roleplaying I'm supposed to be working on UASG.

This works timewise except that I should be doing the writeups straight after the sessions because that makes the most sense. Some writeups take longer than others.

We really didn't do a lot in April because it kind of sucked.  Both of our dogs died within weeks of each other.  Everyone was pretty devastated, the kids had grown up with those dogs.

The big dog was an early birthday/Christmas present for me as I'd decided I wanted a dog.  The kids were 5, 3 and 1 at the time.

The small dog came to us three years later.  J's dog had since died and we were considering getting another puppy when a friend asked if we wanted another dog as her parents were downsizing and unable to keep all of their animals.  We said sure and after a trial run, the small dog moved in.

I've made zero progress on Gundry as there is a checkbox which I think I need to tick in Particle Edit mode to make the bake show up so I can edit it, and it seems to be a guaranteed crash.  So looks like at this stage unless the new hair system drops sooner than I'm expecting it, I pretty much have to go the curve guide/soft body route.

Which means trying to figure out why my curve guides refuse to stick to their bone hooks and putting up with hair flapping around in anime locks (which at least won't be too terrible for this project because it's kind of semi-anime anyway).

And after Gundry I'm just going to be stuck in general as I don't have descriptions of the other characters, and the only other one I can do I'm not sure if I'm still doing.

For the Avian base model I'm currently trying to make a particle feather that meets my expectations.  This is the start.