February ProgBlog #2: it'll all be worth it in the end...right? Right?!

At least that's what I keep telling myself as I'm internally screaming my way through laying out polygon feathers and thinking about how the curve/particle feathers were easier (even if I couldn't get them to look nice) and there will be more experienced people than me out there facepalming and headdesking or both like why the bloody hell did you go and overcomplicate it like that for when you could have just done {some technique I don't know about that does the same amount of work in less time with better results}.

This malarky is purely because I wanted to be able to assign materials per feather.

I was trying very hard to convince myself not to patch this small bit as it's unlikely to get seen but I did it anyway as knowing my luck it will actually be visible when the wings are folded or when the character is flying or at some point.  But now that I'm doing it, it will probably never get seen.

This is one of the more normal views of it and even then it's an unlikely view.  I'm not sure with the other subprojects but with the current one I'm working on I don't think I have any particular close up shots of the wings at any stage.  I could be wrong though, it's happened before many times.

This simultaneously feels like it's going to take a while and also not that long if I can concentrate on it, it's been a struggle because it's so bloody tedious.

At this stage I think I'm going to keep the base model at one wing because I need to sculpt and adjust the base models and some of the Avians will be buffer than others which means I'll need to adjust the feathers, and it will be a lot quicker to just do that and assign materials on one side and then duplicate it to the other side.

I really hope that after all this nonsense that the polyfeathers are lighter on the rendering and processing than my fluffy feathers and look okay -_-

Aoife is continuing, I'm on the actual shadow layer but I'm not yet sure if I'm going to keep it and the light layer when I get around to doing it or whether I'll just stick with the coloured shading.

I'm pretty sure I will need them for contrast and I know I need both layers before I'll be able to tell for sure if it's going to work or not, but currently I'm staring at it wondering if I should just forego that and leave it with the colour shading.

Meanwhile we're slightly late in posting as while I did finish this last night when I was supposed to post it, I needed to transcribe lesson plans more (mental note to self: when unsure about something put it off til next week while finding out rather than sitting on the thing and doing stuff last second) and wasn't sure if I would have time during and between the other things that needed to get done today so that happened instead.