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Mar
13
2024

March ProgBlog #1: floundering

I deliberately didn't post a progblog last week as I was having a minor tanty about how nothing had changed.  Nothing much has changed still, I continue fighting to square up the mesh but it's working out better with more mesh for more context.

image 27

Feb
21
2024

February ProgBlog #3: the week everything kept falling and then picked up

Last week was "interesting".

I found out (from deviantART via another friend of hers who found out from a mutual friend of theirs on Facebook, which is how I'd suspected for a long time I would find something like this out) that an online friend that I have been talking to almost daily for the last couple of decades had died apparently on Christmas Eve. We had been chatting the week or so before, and she had told me at some point not long before then that she suspected she was cancer-riddled and that her organs were starting to fail and she probably didn't have long left (she suspected cancer quite a while before then but was so terrified of hospitals she chose to just die from it rather than seek treatment, and the myriad of health issues she'd had throughout her entire life probably played a part in that decision too). I don't know what the actual cause of death was.

That took some processing.

Feb
12
2024

February ProgBlog #2: the day everything imploded

We apparently have to use lesson plan templates this year which has increased my admin time a little bit (I now have to translate it into the template to send to my boss instead of just exporting a pdf like I was before).  This would have been fine if LibreOffice hadn't decided that it wasn't going to play nice with the template and I had to rebuild the damn thing so I could use it which took a bit of doing.

Then doing the sorting and processing I've been doing in digikam I had a big rethink about how I manage photos and collections and decided to split out some photos that were either sent to me by family while they were on vacation or photos that were taken of events (J took a few of footy games when we had season passes and I have taken a few of lion dances) into their own collections.

Feb
05
2024

February ProgBlog #1: that feeling when

you could have done so much more if everything had actually gone according to plan.

I'm resigned to using my tablet as a tablet partly because I didn't want to pack it away again and redownload the Wacom drivers and reset my desk setup for the Wacom and mostly because I just want to use the shiny new thing. The most it's done is the occasional mapping whenever I get obsessed over around to it.

On my scheduled project day I remembered that I had exported the config on my MacBook Air to help ease the transition, so I fired up the driver ui and imported it. Exactly nothing happened as far as I can tell, I don't know if I would have noticed any error messages had I started the driver ui from console but I was so annoyed by a failure of something that I think is absolute basics (which may not actually be that basic, I don't know how to do drivers) that I didn't bother looking into it and just set it up again.

Jan
30
2024

January ProgBlog #2

In contrast to characters, furniture is relatively quick and easy to do. Though I did have a massive brainfart moment and temporarily forgot how I'd done woodgrainesque textures as it's been a while.

after I remembered that despite its distinctly woodgrainy appearance I wasn't supposed to use a Wave Texture, I was supposed to use and distort a Noise Texture, then it came back

image 25

Sprat and I joked about warning kids with tails to not mess around on the chairs (the usual thing of don't swing on them etc) and then them falling over and getting their tails kinked and getting stuck in the chairs after falling and having unsympathetic caregivers yelling TOLD YOU.

Jan
16
2024

January ProgBlog #1: (not) working (much) with (a lot of) distractions

Silly Season Shenanigans set a precedent apparently, as the first progblog of the year is also late.

I've been home for the holidays, that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it

After finishing silly season shenanigans and homeschool miscellany (the two things that had a time limit) I was finally able to get back onto the Avian base model. For a change everything progressed relatively quickly despite the poor little MacBook Air struggling (it was enough to convince me to aim for the Framework 16 instead of the 13, the idea of the graphics module won me over despite the 13 being my vastly preferred form factor).

Jan
04
2024

September - December Homeschool Miscellany

I had bought The Art of War in very recent history (can't remember precisely when but I feel like it's been at least a year by now) as 14yo had expressed a desire to read it. He didn't get around to actually reading it until recently, when he suddenly went on a health kick (both physical and mental) and on advice of J and 18yo, started trying to get in at least a little bit of exercise, eat a healthy breakfast (the kids and I don't really eat breakfast as we never feel particualrly hungry for a while after waking up) and read a book every day.

Jan
02
2024

Happy silly season 2023

happy silly season 2023

Happy slightly late silly season!

A little bit late due to a combination of family shenanigans and whatnot, forgetting how to draw, doing a different method, realising that method would take too long, attempting to draw again, finally remembering how to draw and then trying to blitz it out around everything else in by then one day left, stymied slightly by a very fun new year party and actually finished it on time but then when I went to export it Krita and/or the MacBook started playing silly buggers and insisted on giving me blurry images and so I airdropped it to sibling dearest to see if she could work something out.  She couldn't get it to resize nicely either and after trying to work out if it was a brush problem or a Mac problem she ended up taking a screenshot and sending me that, and that is what got uploaded at the end of the night x_x

She also helped with the design of the silly shirts and socks by shooting me keywords.

Nov
26
2023

November ProgBlog #1: I choose this

Because while it's still not amazing it's at least somewhat passable and it's working out a lot better than the polydown (much easier to layer for starters).

image 353

I really, really, really should be doing separate systems for the body and the wings but I'll fix it later (as there will probably be something better to fix/redo it with later) but meanwhile fortuitously the edge transitions to skin will actually look fine as the child hairs from the top looks conveniently like fluffy down (sadly it didn't work upside down both ways I tried it but this is fine).

Oct
31
2023

October ProgBlog #2: sunk cost fallacy

Stuff went super slowly again as states happened (everything went well) and I dithered around trying to fix the feather patterning (including readjusting a lot of the feathers that got displaced and put everything else out of whack when I fixed the underlying mesh, I really should know better by now that while other people can get away with not doing things I never can) and flatten things out a little bit.

image 349

And after spending way too much time and effort on this malarky and really struggling with polydown, I revisited the idea of particle down.  The last time I tried this it didn't work out great.