April ProgBlog #1: speaking of ridiculous things

Poor Gundry is copping a lot of flak for his amazing hair.

I was hoping that Blender 3.1 would have better hair physics (or at least actually emitter deflect) and I would be able to let it flop and bake before attempting to style it but no such luck.

Unfortunately Blender crashed before I could get a screenie of the pathetic wispy hair that happened in one of my render tests before I remembered to change the hair settings (had accidentally set them to the very thin settings I use for eyelashes and eyebrows), so here's a shot of unstyled luscious locks.

I'll see what happens with the hair dynamics after combing the lot into position (ergh) but if worse comes to worse I do know how to shape it reasonably quickly with curve guides (I call it "the hard way" not because it's hard but because it's fiddly and tedious) but I haven't yet figured out how to make the curves work as soft bodies (which is theoretically a thing that can be done) which should (theoretically) make them easier to animate.

The male Avian base now has wings.

Next thing will be the tail and after that I think I will actually try putting feathers on the base model and seeing how that goes as everything should theoretically be fine as long as they don't have to use the modifier stack for anything.

Meanwhile the gloss part of the tattoo is going great and for once I'm not being sarcastic.

It's proceeding relatively quickly as long as I can see what I'm doing (which means slowing down a lot in the green and blue sections) but everything up til then went by fast.  I actually started on the phoenix this time so still have the dragon to go.

I have to redo the sculpt as well so I think I'll wait til next pay cycle and get that Sculpt Layer addon from ArtStation or something seeing as it seems to have vanished from Blender Market for some reason.