February ProgBlog #1: that feeling when

you could have done so much more if everything had actually gone according to plan.

I'm resigned to using my tablet as a tablet partly because I didn't want to pack it away again and redownload the Wacom drivers and reset my desk setup for the Wacom and mostly because I just want to use the shiny new thing. The most it's done is the occasional mapping whenever I get obsessed over around to it.

On my scheduled project day I remembered that I had exported the config on my MacBook Air to help ease the transition, so I fired up the driver ui and imported it. Exactly nothing happened as far as I can tell, I don't know if I would have noticed any error messages had I started the driver ui from console but I was so annoyed by a failure of something that I think is absolute basics (which may not actually be that basic, I don't know how to do drivers) that I didn't bother looking into it and just set it up again.

The second thing that went wrong immediately afterwards was that I noticed the linux driver ui didn't have the option of setting up application profiles like I could on MacOS.

I had a mini meltdown at this point, ate way too much chocolate and added more buildings and footpaths and things to OSM and played stupid phone games for way too long.

While mapping I was backburning workarounds and eventually settled on using the key groups as the easiest option, as there are four of them. Currently 1 is Krita, 2 is keys I use excessively in Blender, 3 is currently on standby as I think I will need to use it for keys that I excessively use in Blender only when sculpting and/or animating but there is a non-zero chance I may have to use it for KDEnlive, and 4 is currently being used for the OSM id editor but as that's four keys I can just drop it if I need to (it was mostly just to mitigate my godawful ergonomics anyway).

That and way too much chocolate later, I finally got around to stuffing around with the feather rigs and decided at that point that I was going to do the same iterative workflow that I did when building Zara and do the rig when I build a character, and then backport it to the base model. So I made the female version and then moved on to the Dragonkin base.

I don't hate retopo quite as much as I hate rigging but I still hate retopo and that was up next, as I was going to somewhat trace over the shape of the wings and horn crest and just do a better job with the topology this time round.

So of course the next thing that went horribly wrong was that my expensive retopo addon exploded (threw an error when I was trying to enable it, it didn't occur to me that it wouldn't work in Blender 4). Fortunately, the cheap one worked and my how it's gotten better over the years.

Took a few goes to wrap my head around and aside from apparently being stuck in bsurfaces mode (which is fine as it's my preferred method anyway) and having to constantly "update shrinkwrap" (I'm not sure why it goes awry every so often but when it does the button fixes it) it's been pretty good to work with.

Then it took several more hours to get this far (because I suck at shoulder loops to begin with and double shoulders are the worst, I'm not looking forward to that very tight connection area when I join the meshes later).

Least that's working out for next time I get back to it.