technonaturalist

I finally finished the Dragonkin models (there was some jiggery pokery with the uv maps after I’d finished the claws) and restarted Red.

It was supposed to be a simple case of append the male Dragonkin model, append all the materials I’d already done, do the horns, do the multires sculpt.

It was not a simple case.

I redid the shaders, backported some of the modifications made (knocking out some extraneous colour nodes and adding in some forgotten bump nodes, good thing I can run multiple Blenders) and then started working on the horns.

I was so happy when I made the female Dragonkin model as I thought I was finally done. I went to make a new file to start (re)making Red when I suddenly realised…forgot the retractable claws.

Ergh.

And then I realised I’d put the tail too high up the back and that the base was too thin.

More ergh.

I spent a few good hours sulking.

Then got back into it. On the bright side there’s always dodgy looking things that crop up when modelling.

Remembering things is quicker than learning things from scratch, but I still hate uv mapping.

I’m also so very tired and so very glad that I made a very early decision to never pitch this thing given the amount of hate 3d gets. If I’d been doing it for anyone other than myself I would have probably given up long ago.

Another late start today as I had a bit of laundry to do (though I did get eldest to get it off the line for me in the evening as I found outside too cold) and also spent a bit too much time catching random episodes of Demon Slayer (article contains spoilers) with 17yo who was recovering from a head cold.

But at least the hands are done.

Connecting the wings to the body was a bit tricky but got there eventually and didn’t take as long as I thought it would. What took longer (and pushed me past bedtime again) was deciding I needed to do the wing membrane texture RIGHT NOW because I don’t even know why anymore.

Closing meshes is on the long list of things I hate.

Okay I don’t actually feel strongly enough to hate it, but it is annoying when things don’t just close nicely.

The last membrane and finger went pretty quickly and smoothly, which somewhat made up for the super late start caused by house discussions. At least I was able to get some work done, we had been going to turn the power out so that some cabling could safely go into the roof.

Part 1 happened over the course of weeks or months a couple of decades ago when I migrated to Drupal from livejournal (I didn’t really note how long it took partly because I wasn’t interested at the time and mostly because I was trying to get through that cringey era as quickly as possible).

Part 2 started a few months ago after I finally (after way too long because I am nothing if not unreasonably stubborn) accepted the fact that I’ve been really, really struggling to keep on top of Drupal updates alongside everything else. By stupid dumb luck I saw hugo mentioned in an article on one of my feeds (the author was migrating their site from Drupal 6 to hugo from memory) and went and had a look.

The last week of May saw a bunch of random and mostly unrelated setbacks and I’ve been trying to frantically catch up ever since.

This morning was icing as a dead tree fell onto the neighbour’s house. We heard the crack of the trunk breaking as it fell, thought it was thunder, and then knew something was up when we heard the impact and scurried out to investigate. Nobody was injured but their roof is going to need some repairs. Spent a big chunk of the morning helping them to clean up and joking about how none of us had had a chance to have our coffee yet.

Tha gap isn’t even that big but that’s what it feels like right now.

The wing membrane is being a pain in the system. And I thought I was going so well too.

I attempted combining with a previous version where I’d tried bordering with triangles and eventually got this monstrosity which I hated but less than the other ones.

Finally managed to get past the last stuck point.

I’m somewhat pessimistically wondering how far away the next one is.

I managed to finish the wing arm and the membrane and was concentrating really hard on making sure that the membranes (which will be distorting the most) were as squared as possible and doing the best I could with everything else (inevitably the arms turned into rectangles including around joints where I really would have preferred more squares).

And I’m tired and I’m so far beyond sick to death of constantly redoing things that I’ve already done.

I’m recovering from a head cold (which set in because I chose to go to work and cover for people who were actually full on sick when I could feel it coming and is taking its sweet time buggering off because I couldn’t just rest up on the days that I had to do so) so had not much in the way of concentration and spent a lot longer staring at nothing with greater frequency than usual. Things are coming together to some value of coming together.