November ProgBlog #1: legitimate reasons

I actually had them for the delay for once, and that was going out for birthday churros (not mine, but someone's). 

After that I was trying to render out some super quick and dirty walk cycles (which are literally just hands and feet approximating walking motions, no refinements or personality injected whatsoever, which partially accounts for the jerkiness and the other part is only vaguely remembering how to do looping gifs and animated gifs in general and couldn't get the timing right when making the gif, I haven't done one for game engines yet and I don't use them at all for animations) and my computer crashed three times while rendering the first one (I'm a bit extra so I did three different views because of course I did).

^{I had to download a whole ass module just to get the animated gifs to work in Drupal -_-}

JJ decided to trade ram with me to see if that was the problem, so I got his (much nicer ram, and 2x16Gb so I should be able to add another 2x16Gb of the same type down the line and go excessive with it).  Problem persisted (another crash) while rendering out the second.  He did some research and then some bios shenanigans (something about increasing the power to the cpu) and I was then able to render the rest of the second and all of the third with no crashes.  We're hoping putting more power in has resolved my random crash issues and it will give me a bit more time to save up for a new one (at which point I will probably also get a new case with at least a transparent side panel because my graphics card and the new ram have got pretty lights, transplant the existing parts to the new one and start frankenboxing the current one into a render node).

As it was only 60 frames he asked if I had a bigger/more complicated scene that would take all night to render.  I don't have any more animations but I did have a pretty intense frame somewhere that would probably stress test it sufficiently, but I might just wait til the next time I have something worth rendering.

Attempted to focus on project again, did a bit more reading, as far as I can tell I need to export an Alembic for the game engine to be able to understand particle hair.  I exported the walk cycle to Alembic and ended up with a 9.6Gb file.  Hm maybe not that then.  I guess I have to export just the emitter object (the body) with the hair as abc, as far as I can tell from reading and the video or two that I suffered through (nothing to do with the presentation of the videos which were quite good from memory, it's 100% me and not being good at grokking video tutorials), and export animations as dae or fbx.

And then in my infinite wisdom I realised that Drupal 8 was hitting EOL and I should probably upgrade.  When I was running a business I would do upgrades (and often be up really late because anything more than a basic blog almost never go smoothly) on Friday or Saturday nights to minimise downtimes (because I wasn't hosting sites big enough to bother with failovers).  That took many, many hours and while it worked in the end I don't know why or how and that was one of many reasons why I'd quit webdev (probably permanently this time).

Fighting with that plus kind of meandering around not really getting much housework done and generally failing at bullying kids into doing things exactly none of us are interested in or could get paid any amount of money to even pretend to care about just to appease people in a department that wouldn't know us from a bar of soap, AER stalled completely.

I'm still trying to figure out why I thought that feathers would be quicker than scales given that I have done a few sets of wings in this style now and it is the opposite of quick, and that was with guide lines which I don't have here.

I keep telling myself it'll be good when it's done, I just need to get it done x_x

I still have the whole other wing to do -_-

Next couple of weekends are going to be busy and then there will probably be the usual end of year shenanigans so there will likely only be tiny amounts of prog to blog.  At least one of my projects is making noticable headway and it's not even my project x_x