June ProgBlog #1: There was a gap

In that gap was a slightly unexpected new puppy (which I wrote a bit about in the homeschool miscellany) and covid (not worth the ridiculously excessive fuss and the frantic stripping of as much freedom as possible in that space of time that was made of it, wouldn't recommend the headache though). And then there was me figuring it wasn't worth the blog because there hadn't been much prog and trying to manage that and consistently failing as other things kept happening (not least of which comp season started).

After a lot of stuffing around, I eventually worked out there was something either wrong with the file or with the particle system that was making my curve guides not work.  A bit more experimentation later I found that recreating the particle system worked, and that NURBs paths no longer seemed to work but Beziers did.

I also found that changing the viewport path steps to 4 also made it work on the working copy, so switched back to that as that had wave settings that I liked. Still doesn't work with nurbs path but that's fine I can bezier. Just need to add a few more curves to get the shape right and then I guess I'll have to figure out how to animate it later.

_{I'm really annoyed that took weeks}

This part of the mesh was a huge mistake but I couldn't figure out how else to close it.

And the reason that it's a huge mistake is because I can't sculpt around there properly, the denser area is more reactive than the sparser area so keeps bumping more than I want it to.  Got similar issues around the knuckles.  Aargh.

On the bright side at least they animate alright I think x_x

I'm currently failing to not obsess too hard about the feet and then I'm looking forward to playing with Sculpt Layers which I finally bought.

I'm making one more attempt with particle instanced downy feathers using different vertex groups to get around the rotation issue, and if I can't get that working then I'm going with these hair clump particle feathers.

I've been feeling pretty down with the amount of rework that I have to do constantly (it's been literal years of rework).  Trying to look on the bright side, at least I don't have to pipeline anymore (I may consider it if I found something that was so amazingly mindblowing better both in design AND workflow for something that I wanted to do that it was worth the effort of wasting yet more time nutting it out).  Pipelining is the absolute worst.