technonaturalist

Actually the clothes bones aren’t connected to anything.

I had one more go with playing with lattices and bonevelopes for the croptop rig, and then went back to the straight bonevelope rig and added a few more bones and made all the bones smaller and with smaller envelopes, as I had a lot more control over the shape and the twists of those annoying little shoulder straps with the bonevelope rig. It’s holding shape a bit better.

For once I actually had a good reason about not getting the progblog done on the Friday. 13yo and I spent the entire day making a sign for a birthday driveby. Saturday was the actual driveby and because I’m really smart and hate driving I decided I would rather hike it in 39C because that’s how much I hate driving (it was just down the road). That coupled with drifting back into habits that I’ve had since childhood that not even 12 years of strict bedtimes and wake up times and attempts that always fail despite people screaming at me that it absolutely is just a bad habit and I’m just not trying hard enough, I quite simply work much, much better at night.

If you know that I only clump months if at least one of them has been quiet/lazy what does this tell you? XD

_{I also did it at the end of last year I hope that didn’t set a precedent >_>}

For new readers, December is usually insanomonth when all the end of year shenanigans occur on top of silly season shenanigans, so while I still try to squeeze some things in, it usually (but not always) ends up a write-off as far as the socially accepted definition of education goes. It seems that January has become my planning month. I can’t remember if I usually take a month to plan anyway but I definitely needed it after last year, and most of it was probably taken up researching and writing up the planning budget which I’ve never done before and numbers always take longer anyway even if all I’m doing is making sure spreadsheet formulas and data entry are correct (again for new readers, I’m somewhat dyscalculiac which is why I try not to help with anything other than basic maths).

Guess I better blog the prog even though I don’t feel like there’s a lot of it ^_^;

After naffing about yet again with various configurations of bones and lattices and constantly stressing about how I want the bloody end result to look (including whether or not I wanted loose hair to be combed and only wind affected or soft bodied like styled hair will have to be and “have to” is loose because I currently only know one way of styling hair in a fashion I can control), I tried cloth dynamics again with a much higher density and slightly more squarish mesh (and also fixed the mess the pants mesh was, I didn’t realise it had borked badly as I usually look at things like how the screenshots are and without the wireframe lines) and it’s kind of working now.

I think almost everything where people might gather has pretty much been shut down thanks to dumbarse virus, so we’re just at home now aside from when we go out to “exercise” (which is to say the bigs and I aren’t really doing much and J is taking youngest skating every day). I thought an upside would be that I would have more time to work but that has yet to happen. A lot of it has been to do with staggering around trying to find a new normal, as I don’t think we’re fully in lockdown so we can still go out, they just want a lot of social distancing so I need to find places that are far enough away from other people to take the kids that I can also drive to without further destroying the problem shoulder, which means we might need to just wait for J and do it over a weekend or have him switch up a work day or something if that’s a possibility. There are some nice bushwalks we could go on but it would just be with the boys as middle child hates bushwalking.

Really, really slow.

I don’t even know what I’ve been doing half the time, just that there’s been a lot of it, most of it involved frenetically cleaning things to try to keep places open as long as possible (we’re slowly toppling, homeschool group has been cancelled until “later in the year” and gym and dance are struggling on but we’re anticipating possibly being shut down before the school holidays) not to mention the shenanigans with steem I’ve since moved) and I missed last Friday’s progblog (aaargh sorry), Tuesday’s ko-fi update (really sorry!) and I’m really, really tired (which is part of why I’m really, really slow, by the time I can work I can’t focus).

I missed my Tuesday ko-fi update because there was a huge kerfuffle on steem. I had nothing to do with it (didn’t participate or contribute anything aside from using the rest of my witness votes) because it was way over my head and out of my league. It annoyed me enough that concentrating on anything important was hard so I did what I usually try to do if able when annoyed and drew.

The sculpt repairs are coming along slowly and painfully but otherwise looking all right.

The areas I’ve cleaned up have got bigger triangles/more grey area, black bits are super dense mesh. I did actually do part of the face but from quite close, it was a lot darker than that before. The blotchy spots are the bits that were giving me grief in 3d Coat. Sometimes if I go over them enough times with the clean clay brush (doesn’t seem to matter what the setting is) they sometimes will eventually separate from the main mesh which will then let me objectify them and delete them when they go to their own layers. Most of the time all that happens is that holes form in the mesh and I can’t always close them and everything gets violently pulled out of shape and then the other side is destroyed. This is what I get for not working with virtual mirrors (because I keep switching sides because sometimes some things are more comfortable on one side than the other).

I’ve spent an accumulation of 2-5 years redoing various swathes of work (mostly in the 3d department, but there was nearly a year worth of solid script fixing as well) for this project so to say that I am well and truly over it and desperately want a massive chunk of progress is an understatement of truly epic proportions.

But guess what I’m doing again because this

happened in 3d Coat and after failing to sort it out (there were some holes that 3d Coat would fill and otherwise it simply did not know what to do with) I sent the model to Blender to patch the holes.

LOOK AT IT.

THE RAINBOW MOVES. I LOVE IT.

The default setting where it’s just gently scrolling left to right is my favourite though it can also spiral and “rain” (where keys randomly light up in a rain hitting the ground kind of pattern). My old keyboard had a few issues but otherwise still worked perfectly fine (the biggest issues I had were it was a lot harder than I like so my typing speed was greatly reduced as I had to pound the keys, I like just touching them and getting a response, and the right side of the spacebar had popped off so I had to switch to using my left thumb which is the off side for space) but J somehow got the idea that it was well on the way out and bought me that as a wide margin birthday present (no I’m not telling you when that is but it’s definitely not yet XP).