technonaturalist

It’s been a few weeks.

And then I finally got around to writing this thing, and was making some half-decent progress (while chatting to sibling dearest in our inaugural hopefully weekly project chat and progressing some other stuff as well) and then had one of those infuriating semi-frequent crashes that refuses under any circumstances to be diagnosed (it’s probably hardware because there is literally nothing that I am doing that can reproduce them reliably).

The scales are still going. The only thing that’s changed is that I’m now in the yellow PURPLE section! XD

And I realised after actually looking at ko-fi that I haven’t updated for over two weeks, oops x_x (I only paid attention because they said they were letting gold members trial the tiers and that I had early access to be able to provide feedback, it was supposed to be for gold members but I’m not one so I guess there was either a slow rollout or a trial group, either way it seems to be open for everyone now). Part of the reason for that is because I was doing very short update posts on Tuesday which has now changed to working on something else day (other project or cameos which I really need to get back to as well) and I quite often will work on the Fridays til really late before I actually do and post the progblog (Friday being my designated progblog posting day) so after I’ve posted it I usually just go to bed (because it’s between midnight and 2am by then) and then forget to update when I wake up again.

I feel like I’ve been doing this forever.

Have I mentioned how much I didn’t want to be doing this again?

On the bright side it is at least organised a lot better this time even if it’s probably overkill as far as textures are concerned, and I hope it looks better, and I’m about two thirds of the way through the yellow so I’m approaching halfway?

Once again, doing a bit more work on character portraits than 3d, because my brain just doesn’t want to deal with the scales. I eventually decided to keep my character consistent with the other ones (Captain Gundry and Bricky Steve) rather than doing the different headshots (partly because I’m kind of designing the outfit and the “weapon” which isn’t an actual weapon, just something she uses to beat people up with when she isn’t riding around on it, on the fly and mostly because it is going to take the better part of forever if I do it that way, now at least I have some idea of when I might finish).

During May, 12yo decided to get into fruit sculpture, and made a ridiculous amount of stuff out of bananas. Because I was really preoccupied with I can’t remember what at the time, the only thing I caught a photo of was this “sword”.

I did have time to make a trip to Spotlight to pick up some elastic and some fabric for 14yo to make a blanket thing that apparently only needs tying together.

There has not been a lot of progress this week, partly because I felt quite inspired by Sunday’s roleplaying game and ended up working on character portraits instead,

and mostly because I’m hand drawing the dragon scales -_-

Started off with the belly scales like

and then got bored so ended up doing the entire spine/mane/fin/I don’t even know what it is anymore. But I’m still angsting about whether the purple mane is okay as is or if I should be making it a full face beard as a lot of the references I’m looking at do.

I’ve always had a great respect for tattoo artists. I may or may not have mentioned the first time I did these tattoos that that respect increased by roughly an order of magnitude because unlike me they don’t have undo buttons. And somehow can make things look good from most angles. I’m really feeling that again.

Also despite having had to do it for this version I still don’t understand how people paint from colour blocks.

I did the scars as a bump map using bpainter. Then figured out how to string normal and bump nodes so that everything would go in nicely.

Normal map texture colour out plugs in to colour in of normal map node. Normal socket out of normal map node plugs into normal in of bump map node.

Alternate title: udim bulb.

That’s my poor attempt at a play on words, not mapping a bulb using udims x_x

I borked something severely while messing around with multiple single tile 8k maps, udim tiles with and without 8k tiles, and an add-on that bakes to udim tiles in preparation for this very progblog and ended up doing fun things to the ram

The rework continues.

I finished sculpting (it was the digits that took the longest again, all 10 of them because I was working in mirror mode so the other 10 on the other side were getting done simultaneously) and baked the normal map.

The first time it was yellow apparently because I didn’t use a cage. I don’t know why one was needed but apparently it was a thing that was needed so I checked that box but got it to extrapolate 1mm or 1cm (can’t remember which) rather than making a cage mesh like I did with Red. That one came out blue/purple/pinkish like it was supposed to.