technonaturalist

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:

And the forever unchanging habit of failing weekly progblogs because I feel bad about not progging enough.

I have been doing the hair strands in pairs which is one of the reasons why it’s been taking the better part of forever. Doing it in larger groups/rows has previously always ended badly for me. Recently I spat it and decided it’s been a while, let’s just see how we go.

15yo’s cardboard armour had been getting more and more detailed each iteration. I hadn’t seen any for a while and thought maybe he’d finally lost interest in it but one day some parts came in large boxes and suddenly there was more.

It was quite detailed with individual pieces cut out and taped together (an entire roll of packing tape was used in this endeavour). I think it was a potential practice run for making larger cosplays (he had dreams of making a Space Marine cosplay like the one he’d seen at the Royal Show and then he realised how much effort was involved and that it wasn’t going to be a few hour thing like his previous projects.

15yo apparently only got beaten once or twice in all the rounds he played in his Warhammer tournament and placed (the winner was someone who had been playing a lot longer). We all agreed it was a pretty good outcome for a first tournament.

17yo was able to pass her level 6 badge in the first competition and 19yo got his level 7 badge in the second one (he had missed the first one due to illness and he and his coach decided to risk the do or die in the second competition as if he didn’t get it then, he was out of states). I think most of 17yo’s kids did alright.