technonaturalist

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.

During my manual migration I have been cringing at all my old artwork and rediscovering a few gems such as part of a conversation I had with one of my friends about 3d back in 2013. They said: Lol shame there is not one 3d app to rule them all that does ALL the things and is moddable to suit the individual’s work flow I replied i would like One App that had a workflow and was split like Lightwave (though there’s thought of unifying Lightwave, i was really pissed about it when i first heard about it, then more recently now that i’m better at this stuff i realised i don’t care if they unify it as long as the workflow doesn’t change too much and i can still box model) with a scupt mode as awesome as Sculptris that also integrated animatable sculpting/morphs like ChronoSculpt and had cool retopo tools like ZRemesher from ZBrush or BSurfaces from Blender and a dynamic paint mode like Blender or Sculptris but probably easy like Sculptris but that can update UVs on the fly and a rigging toolset that’s easy as either Genoma in Lightwave or whatever Blender has (haven’t tried but apparently good) and definitely less crashy than Genoma deep breath in

I would have really, really, really liked to have had this thing done and dusted and been moving on to the next bit by now but it persists in being relentlessly annoying. But I got onto a roll over the last couple of nights (which as my rolls usually do resulted in me forgetting to go to sleep) and made some headway. Most of my problem was having two direction changes very close to each other.

I deliberately didn’t post a progblog last week as I was having a minor tanty about how nothing had changed. Nothing much has changed still, I continue fighting to square up the mesh but it’s working out better with more mesh for more context. To some value of better. My DE of choice got upgraded to KDE6 which is mostly great for the most part. I had to swap out my theme switcher (Yin Yang) because it didn’t want to work under Wayland.

Last week was “interesting”. I found out (from deviantART via another friend of hers who found out from a mutual friend of theirs on Facebook, which is how I’d suspected for a long time I would find something like this out) that an online friend that I have been talking to almost daily for the last couple of decades had died apparently on Christmas Eve. We had been chatting the week or so before, and she had told me at some point not long before then that she suspected she was cancer-riddled and that her organs were starting to fail and she probably didn’t have long left (she suspected cancer quite a while before then but was so terrified of hospitals she chose to just die from it rather than seek treatment, and the myriad of health issues she’d had throughout her entire life probably played a part in that decision too).

We apparently have to use lesson plan templates this year which has increased my admin time a little bit (I now have to translate it into the template to send to my boss instead of just exporting a pdf like I was before). This would have been fine if LibreOffice hadn’t decided that it wasn’t going to play nice with the template and I had to rebuild the damn thing so I could use it which took a bit of doing.

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.

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.

Silly Season Shenanigans set a precedent apparently, as the first progblog of the year is also late. I’ve been home for the holidays, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it After finishing silly season shenanigans and homeschool miscellany (the two things that had a time limit) I was finally able to get back onto the Avian base model. For a change everything progressed relatively quickly despite the poor little MacBook Air struggling (it was enough to convince me to aim for the Framework 16 instead of the 13, the idea of the graphics module won me over despite the 13 being my vastly preferred form factor).