technonaturalist

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).

On Tuesday I posted this screenie of Zara in showoff pose on ko-fi

and that’s where I’m still currently stuck while the next few moves work themselves out in my head.

It was a good excuse to jump back to Red and redo the retopo. My edge loops are probably not the best right now but they were a lot worse on my original retopo, no wonder I was having so much trouble with deformations. Not to mention it was probably a lot heavier than it should have been. Having said that it was kind of an experiment in seeing if I could get high poly to work and I’m not smart enough so I’ll stick with mid poly and subdivision surfaces. And fix all the edge loops while I’m about it because there was no coming back from that one.

I thought I was pretty much done with Zara aside from wardrobe (which I can build out as I proceed through scripts) when I remembered that the goggles are an essential piece of kit as she’s blind in the light without them.

Then I spent way too long staring at her for a bit before sending a screenie to Sprat asking if the eyes were too far apart. She confirmed that they were and that I should also maybe move the mouth up a tiny bit. So I did.

Last night was an exercise in frustration. There was a bunch of chores to finish up, and then all I wanted to do was some art and to hopefully get the progblog knocked out before it got too late.

Instead of spending a couple of hours being able to work solidly after putting youngest to bed (the two bigs had gone off on yet another sleepover), I ended up fiddling around with the material for Zara’s eyes in an attempt to make them reflective for maybe half an hour to an hour, and then the rest of the time trying to recover/work with one crash that happened during a test render (which is extremely inconvenient given this is what I got the rig for but sadly not that unusual) and a weird drama where the keyboard and mouse stopped being useful (both mouse and stylus would move the cursor but clicks were ignored, and all input keyboard was ignored except for switching terminals, and then it would work perfectly fine in another terminal) that resulted in me downing tools for the night (angrily hard shutting down the rig and leaving it off overnight which I don’t recall ever doing before).

Or: why fyn has a ridiculously comprehensive and detailed head universe.

Like all good stories, it started off innocently enough. I finished eyebrows and eyelashes and did some super quickie expression tests:

My lights are really close and pretty bright hence the intense reflection, if they’re still too reflective under normal lighting conditions I’ll have to fiddle with the node a bit more.