Not a lot has changed since last week. I did some experiments with the hair, trying to get some better (or any in the case of some child hairs which I suspect from reading around don't acknowledge physics anyway) collisions with the goggle strap. None of them were successful, so I complained to my little artbees that I would just have to wait til Blender dropped its hair update. Then @rainite (who keeps on top of these things unlike some fyns who shall remain nameless) sent a link that indicated that the physics update (which includes hair) will be along later this month so I'll worry about it then (and hopefully will have this one out of the way and be onto the next thing by the time it drops so I can play with it in the next one) and just get it baked (I'm getting stymied by having to manually step through -120 to 0 before I can hit space and do other things while it steps itself through and hopefully doesn't crash, but I'm now saving the cache to disk as I think it crashed last time).
Stepping through manually was taking a lot longer than it should because the physics calculations I had it doing were pretty heavy (30 quality steps for the hair and the crest which are two different particle systems) and also because while I'm waiting for it to calculate I skip over to hive or onto copy/pasting my notes from their sqldump hell into their new Drupal-based home and sometimes spend more time doing those other things than checking to make sure the frame is done and ready to step to the next one.
I got there eventually and was happy to find that 30 steps seems to be enough to avoid premature balding.
Baked them out (or at least I hope I did when I pressed the button that said "bake"), went back to the pants figuring they shouldn't be too hard as I'd already done a bit of work on them and just needed to pick up where I left off.
I figured wrong.
A lot of settings were tweaked and the computer rebooted twice (once unintentionally because it crashed and once deliberately after a system update) and I got something that seemed to be doing what it was supposed to be doing. Also trying a new thing where I took off most of the weight maps (aside from the pelvis ones which are where my main pin group around the waistband is) from the pants so they're mostly driven by cloth dynamics rather than both armature and cloth dynamics, and waiting and seeing if I have to put the weight group back around the bottom leg holes as I put the pin group on them with a strength of 0.5 so they'd hold shape a tiny bit better (or at least that's the plan with my current understanding of cloth dynamics).
Then there were more random crashes and more stuff that needed to be done and several accidental misclicks that would jump way too many frames and mess things right up so basically I've been stuck redoing pre-sims for days.
I'm really annoyed as I was hoping to have this anim done by now and ready to post which is why I held off the progblog for so long. Looks like it's going to be the next one.
Much aargh.
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