technonaturalist

Pulled earthy colours today so very boringly it was a plant, but at least not the one I had in mind when I pulled the pens out.

holoz0r started up a community for handwritten posts on hive and it seemed as good an attempt as any to try to post more than just my irregular progblogs.

^{I do actually have a lot of stuff that I would like to blog about, I just don’t seem to have the time to do it in}

I’m deliberately doing it in my sketchbook/journal as I’m very casual with it. I’m not sure when I started stressing about blog posts but I’ve just realised that I really do consider what’s “worth” blogging about and I’m not sure when that developed.

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.

In which I flip normal behaviour and make lazy loading images the default and eager loading the thing you have to do unless it’s the first item in a list.

The nonsense I get up to when deciding to try to make everything green on Pagespeed.

I should also point out I have no idea if I’m doing things correctly or not, this is very much a hackjob.

Here I check to see if I wrote loading= when calling the figure shortcode from index.md like so: