June ProgBlog #2: buttery

That's what Blender sculpt mode feels like at the moment.

I don't know whether it's because I found some settings that make me happy or whether I finally got the polycount down to something Blender is happier with (got it down to 3.5M from 3.7M after I decided to reduce the polycount in the wing membranes using super light dabs with the clay brush and it's been jumping mostly down as I continue reworking things and Blender remeshes everything I touch) or whether something has been going on under the hood as I swear every time Manjaro does a system update there's a new version of Blender in there somewhere (this may or may not be a slight exaggeration).

With a combination of these settings and possibly what I changed on the smooth tool (as I don't know if holding down the modifier that temporarily makes the current brush the smooth brush uses my settings or the default ones) I've been able to shape how I want and smooth the mesh more than I could in 3d Coat (honestly I don't know what I was doing wrong with 3dC, I was too scared to play with the brushes too much because I was too good at breaking things in there XD).

_{I've since dropped the flow rate to 0 because dots just annoy me for some reason.}

Yes I mostly use the sculptdraw brush.  I'm a terrible artist and a boring person XP

It's often taking a fair few goes over the same area to get things smooth.  Above I'm working on the middle finger now, and have been going over the first section numerous times.  It's only just thinking about starting to smooth out, as I think the autosmooth just gets very confused initially with how ragged everything is.  The ring and pinkie haven't been touched too much yet (I have touched them a few times when a particularly high density knot especially in places that are really illogical has bugged me too much).

Then I remembered this mess (that is to say it leaped into my face when I zoomed out)

and decided rather than fix it to just version save from a previous version that didn't have this problem. 

_{Constantly reworking things is pretty much the story of this project.}

I forgot how dense the mesh was.

So I quickly dashed over the wing membranes with the simplify brush again to get some performance back.

I pretty much have to fix from the beginning again but I can use my butter settings everywhere now.

And that's what I'm doing.

I haven't been able to get a lot done this week as the bigs decided they were going to swap rooms.  13yo decided she really wanted to have a smaller room because she just did (major reason given, supporting reasons were along the lines of apparently the big room was too much of a hassle to clean, and she was in the big room because she was the one with art projects and later on the one doing Tiktok and stuff).  15yo had no problems whatsoever having the bigger room as it meant he could get more cat trees for his cats and his queen bed would fit a lot better in that room than it did in the smaller room (it fit fine in the smaller room, just didn't leave room for anything other than his clothes storage and computer).

They did most of the work and I helped move the heavy furniture and to reassemble 15yo's bed.  And they've left out a lot of stuff which they've either forgotten or didn't want, so guess who has to sort that.

It is something that has needed to be done for a very long time but I didn't want to do it because doing that meant not doing this XD I decided to take today off after working on the sorting and culling last couple of days and have a goal of trying to process at least one box a day over the next few days.  That combined with I think we can go back to normal homeschooling this coming week as all the group activities are resuming means I'll probably not have as much time to work at least til the sorting and reorganising is done, so progblogs will probably be slow and boring for a while yet.