August ProgBlog #3: particle feathers and hair, oh my

I think I've finished the first light and shadow layers for the Eladrin. 

It went pretty quick, I don't know how long it actually took as while Toolsday is the day for it, there was a bit going on.

I was talking to Sprat about having difficulty with feathers (because I'm trying to do Zara's head feathers better) and that I didn't have a feather generator. Then it occurred to me to see if one existed and apparently one does.

The creator allows $0 so that's what I "bought" it for and am playing around with it, and I think I am going to repurchase it when I have money as even though I'm struggling a bit with it (I know pretty much nothing about Geometry Nodes, I'm just trying to get a handle on the settings it provides in the Modifiers tab) I'm pretty sure I'll be able to use it and even if I can't it looks like a tool worth paying for.

Meanwhile I wanted to get a quick render of the hair seeing as I'd done it all but for some reason I was getting the ram filling up and Blender crashing problem again.  It was fine if I stopped one of the particle systems from rendering but I have rendered with all of them there before and they kind of all need to be there so I currently have no idea what changed or why it suddenly stopped.

But the viewport render works.

And that face is pretty much how I feel about things.

_{actually I'm pretty mad but that expression was about as far as I got and then I went to JJ and told him what was going on and said "fix it"}

The hair is sticking out because I'm currently intending to do her hair entirely with dynamics and see if keyframing shenanigans will work better than the rig I was attempting before (rig is easier and more immediate, I haven't tried the keyframe thing to know if it will look better but I do know that it will be more annoying to animate until I get annoyed enough to learn how to make a driver for it).

And whenever the new hair system drops I'll see what I have to modify around it. I really hope I'm able to do stuff a lot easier with it.