January ProgBlog #2

In contrast to characters, furniture is relatively quick and easy to do. Though I did have a massive brainfart moment and temporarily forgot how I'd done woodgrainesque textures as it's been a while.

_{after I remembered that despite its distinctly woodgrainy appearance I wasn't supposed to use a Wave Texture, I was supposed to use and distort a Noise Texture, then it came back}

Sprat and I joked about warning kids with tails to not mess around on the chairs (the usual thing of don't swing on them etc) and then them falling over and getting their tails kinked and getting stuck in the chairs after falling and having unsympathetic caregivers yelling TOLD YOU.

Youngest watched me building the office chair and was astounded that I was making one instead of just taking the infinitely quicker and easier option of just downloading one. I don't think he fully understood when I explained that:

• I needed to design a lot of stuff around the fact that a lot of characters have wings and/or tails
• my texturing style is extremely basic (I have the simplest of nodetrees unlike some of the other monstrosities I've seen around the place)
• I'm not that smart so it would probably take me about as long to adjust existing models and textures to stylistically match each other as it would for me to just make them
• I kind of like making things

I had to go back to using my Wacom tablet when I got home as the my new XP Pen tablet that sibling dearest gifted me for Christmas (that deserves a post on its own but due to shenanigans will have to wait longer) currently doesn't work with my big rig. Working on the feathers was so much quicker and easier and more comfortable (and then I had to remember to switch back to using gpu to render).

Next order of business is rigging and I've been procrastinating this hard because I hate rigging even though I'm using Rigify to make my life easier (and it does make my life a hell of a lot easier).  I have been playing around with shape keys vs bones and I think I will use bones again.

Addition just before posting (which is late because stuff keeps happening): the usb-c card arrived and after some shenanigans where the tablet wasn't being detected at all, it finally got picked up as a tablet, but the display wouldn't turn on.  After running out of things to check, I finally asked J if he was sure that the usb-c ports he had gotten for me put through video.  He was very sure that it did, but after further research realised that I wasn't getting video because it didn't put it through.  And apparently there was none of the right type of card in the entire country so there's now one coming from Europe and it will apparently be here in a few weeks.

I'm slightly miffed but I have this new desk setup now and I don't want to pack the tablet away and do the driver shuffle yet again so it's currently just getting used as a tablet until the new card gets here.