technonaturalist

I rarely get as much done as I want each session but I was unexpectedly a LOT busier than usual.

^{This was meant to be posted yesterday but shenanigans happened}

This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

It is not actually that complicated, I was just going to call the post “re-evaluiation” or something equally direct but then decided I wanted to use the word “contemplation” and then I got a bit carried away.

Blogging was more slogging than anything else last year. Some of it was just time management issues (glitchy brain thing, my brain violently rejects schedules and todo lists but I need them to actually get more stuff done or at least a little bit progressed otherwise what happens is I make immense mindblowing progress on whatever my hyperfocus is on before I burn out in 1-7 days and literally nothing else gets done at all) and sleep issues caused from very incorrectly trying to deal with the time management issues (pro-tip: regularly sacrificing sleep because that’s literally the only thing left that you can cut to try to gain some more time to work on things is guaranteed to make literally everything else exponentially worse, literally).

Experimenting with microblogging and apparently butterfly sketchies are the only way I can break first post paralysis (in this particular case it’s for snaps, actual snaps body text is likely to be similar but different from here as there is an actual character limit there so I can’t waffle as much).

I think it’s time to try something new.

As I’ve mostly been working on characters and outfits recently (or more specifically one character and one outfit) there hasn’t been a lot of room for the usual extremely dodgy looking and usually very random views that can come up when modelling humans. Or so I thought.

I forgot to “apply base” on the multires sculpt before I started making the shirt so I actually made the shirt on top of the default proportions instead of the character’s proportions (a lot bigger) and inadvertently turned her into an adult movie actor.

It’s a new world
It’s a new start
It’s alive with the beating
of young hearts

Vaguely following along from the title of last year’s silly season shenanigan. These Blender versions are going way faster than I’m capable of.

Last year (and possibly the year before that as well, just less recognised/acknowledged for whatever reason) there was some cyclical ridiculousness of trying to get things finished, either failing anyway or succeeding but at the cost of being much further behind on other things or being unable to finish them (major problem in the case of lesson plans!), and then rushing through trying to get those things finished, usually failing because there wasn’t enough time to do them in, and way too often sacrificing sleep as that was the only thing left that I could take time away from, and then having meltdowns because I was overtired and no matter what I did or how hard I worked or how carefully I planned, nothing ever got done anyway. I think it was mostly my useless excuse for a brain desperately wanting to work how it works best, as I know that when I can hyperfocus on something I can get an incredible amount done in the 8-12 hours that particular zone requires. Alas, alack, I need to pretend I’m a functional adult, and my poor brain will never get to operate in its optimal methodology ever again.

After struggling forever with the shape keys for Red’s retractable claws, possibly against my better judgement (for once I’m not actually sure, I might have been going with my better judgement and against my glitches) I decided to deal with it when I got to the first scene where he has his claws out and move on to the next character.

As it was a minor character I didn’t spend a whole lot of time on the sculpt (which I bumped up to subd level 1 purely because the character appears twice), colouring was nice and quick and then I tried a different way of styling the hair.

It’s been a period of time. Two people I know have died recently from two different cancers, another has been diagnosed with yet another type of cancer, I think I did get my yearly chest infection but at least it only lasted for a day this time. I’ve had to fill in at work a bit for various reasons which ate into project work time and also had a few things happening around the house (youngest got a new bed which required rearranging his entire room which is still in progress and there is furniture everywhere and I cracked it and attempted a deep clean of the computer room and only got it half done as I started late and didn’t finish and have yet to resume) which…also ate into project work time.

Four years ago (x_x) I made this piece:

^{Protective is actually 2 and the original Protective was badly drawn in a uni notebook a hundred million years ago}

Earlier this year I decided to “continue” this slightly older video

There I was doing cloth sim, hair dynamics I think and also testing out this clumsy rig I’d made for the Avian crests. In this one I was purely testing the Dragonkin rig and trying extremely hard not to get distracted with (re)learning cloth sim and seeing if the new hair system could animate yet. I also made it slightly nicer than I normally would because it’s been a while since I animated properly.