technonaturalist

April started with 19yo and 17yo’s first concert. 17yo had found out about a Stardew Valley concert and as she loves the game she asked if we could go. 19yo was interested in coming along for the ride but 15yo refused. However the system wouldn’t let me buy three tickets and forced the purchase of four, so 17yo invited one of her besties (who has not played Stardew Valley and knows nothing about it) along. Bestie came along because she likes classical instruments and is in a school ensemble (I call them baby orchestras).

The rest of the year has just been a blur of trying to keep on top of anything never mind everything.

Most of February and March was 15yo painting Warhammer minis.

We both thought it would be funny for him to do a faux painting pose as seen on the internet.

It’s one of those time periods that has been happening more and more lately, where I’ve been feeling slightly melancholy about being another one of those failures that didn’t make it and not from lack of trying.

haaaaaaaaaaaaair

Now that I’ve got a hang of it, this bit is going pretty well and relatively quickly (and is also somewhat meditative at best and mind numbingly, agonisingly tedious at worst).

I feel like this is probably a bit overkill but it is mostly working. The first few times I was doing test renders I couldn’t work out why the lighting was so weird and eventually cottoned on to the hairs being too thick. Once that was fixed it looked a lot better but this other problem that I have persisted and that’s a flare I don’t fully understand happening at some point in the render.

Last Christmas, I gave you my heart we finally made it back to Christmas Island after way too long and this was one of the things sitting under the tree for me from sibling dearest who loves buying Christmas presents.

The gift tag reads:

To [fyn]

The trend of making you carry your own gifts here continues lol. MERRY XMAS!

Rigify feels a lot easier to work with. Got that going faster than I’m used to, most of the fighting in the setup was not quite understanding how to set up a spline tentacle (which I’m using for the tail), for some reason I thought the entire bone chain needed to have the property set but only the root did. It currently has five middle controllers but I may need more, will have to see how prehensile we get with what I’ve got. And also making sure all the bones were in the right spot after I had to move a few things around to fit the mesh.

The Christmas Island trip continued with all its fun and educational opportunies. 15yo found a new “pet” at Lily Beach when we trooped over for our annual campfire.

It was put back down somewhere safe after the photo.

Sprat and 17yo mudskippered around the very shallow water looking for fish.

This was supposed to be the last July ProgBlog but comp season started (that goes for a couple of months of very intense weekends) and then I got a bad chest infection (bastard thing broke my perfect attendance record, I stormed back to work the next day though I probably shouldn’t have and it took its usual 2-3 weeks to bugger off) and then my parents came to town for a visit, so it’s now the first and possibly last August ProgBlog (because comps on days I normally project work and no other day I can sub).

I am fighting an epic battle for my life against my overwhelming desire to scrap this and try again because the topology isn’t quite right and I’m getting lumps when sculpting.

It looks and sculpts/adjusts fine with multires so it will work fine.

I finally finished the Dragonkin models (there was some jiggery pokery with the uv maps after I’d finished the claws) and restarted Red.

It was supposed to be a simple case of append the male Dragonkin model, append all the materials I’d already done, do the horns, do the multires sculpt.

It was not a simple case.

I redid the shaders, backported some of the modifications made (knocking out some extraneous colour nodes and adding in some forgotten bump nodes, good thing I can run multiple Blenders) and then started working on the horns.