technonaturalist

Obviously, I haven’t done uv mapping for a while. Last time was three years ago (jeez I’m so slow aargh it’s too late for me save yourselves). So while I remembered how they worked and seem to have gotten better at actually making/unwrwapping them, I managed to completely forget what they were. So when I was setting up the paint object, I automatically selected the largest they had available (16k), because in Krita I always paint on 16bit canvases.

I was actually intending to do this on Friday, but I was also setting up some new backup drives (my original drive was appropriated) and needed to copy the old backup from my computer (where it’s currently taking up a HELL of a lot of space!) and I found out the hard way that I can’t use 3d Coat and have big copy operations going at the same time because it makes my computer run out of memory.

May was pretty quiet and boring as well. Think we just ended up gaming most of the time (occasional bout of Skylanders with the small one, and a few rounds of Monopoly with everyone, and I think there was some Exploding Kittens in there somewhere as well). Magic and Pokemon cards were sorted (at least by colour and type, and further sorting in the case of the Magic cards depending on how pedantic people were, I think 13yo just sorts by colour and 9yo sorts by colour and type til he gets bored). As per usual when we’re stuck home there was a lot of docos, again mostly concentrated on Horrible Histories and David Attenborough. Very hard for other types of docos to get a look in against those.

I forgot to mention last update. Ages ago (6 years eep) I mashed a calendar for AER. Years later (because I always seem to notice glaring things years later, this does not bode well for whenever I finally get around to animating x_x) I suddenly realised, all the scientists in the Tranquility Calendar are guys.

They were all great and interesting people but seriously?

I mentioned this to darqx and said I wanted to “even” it out a bit (there’s 13 months so it’s going to be slightly lopsided but near enough is good enough as far as I’m concerned). So being the awesome sibling she is, she helped me find a whole pile of notable female scientists from a variety of fields (and by that I mean she found most of them in the time it took me to find a few because one of us can just do things and the other only just do things when the focus is there, and then I somehow had to choose which was bloody hard work).

After looking at how erratic my steem and Patreon feeds can be, I guess I really better put in the effort to make these weekly, perhaps showing off the pathetic amount of progress I didn’t make will kick me into working more harder smarter.

So as I said last update I’m going back to what I know (which is keeping the polycount as low as possible) but experimenting in a slightly different direction (I have a probably unhealthy obsession with needing all the quads to be as square as possible so I tend to end up with slightly dense meshes).

We didn’t do much. There was a lot of Horrible Histories and David Attenborough documentaries on Netflix, a lot of anime, a lot of discussion of character stereotypes. 13yo went through a period of refusing to go to bed, and when confronted on why, good-naturedly joked well he is a teenager, he needs to be rebellious about something. I suggested that the stereotypical teen rebellion thing tended to happen because the children in question felt like they had no control of their lives due to spending large chunks of their day in school, then have to give up even more time on homework, and in order to make sure they’re getting the study stuff done the parents are obliged to restrict the fun stuff. He and his siblings however had due to the style of homeschooling we do, almost all the time in the world to do as they liked, and if he felt that bedtime or something else was cramping his style then he could simply bring it up and we could have a chat about it and either tell him why it had to be that way whether he liked it or not, or negotiate conditions that would work better for everyone. He agreed that it might be better to do that instead. The bigs wanted to decide their own bedtime and are doing so at a reasonable hour (though every now and again I have to poke them before I go to bed).

Blender’s viewport is massively outdated and exceedingly laggy. This has made trying to correct the weights on the ~300k poly model of Red agonisingly painful and take way, way longer than it should be. I still have plans to do a proxy for animating with, but that doesn’t remove the need for the actual model to work. Apparently this will be fixed and updated later this year and from the sounds of the people who are braving it in its current bug-infested state, it will be wonderful. I’m not waiting around for it, I’ll just let it catch up to me which is highly likely.

Finally got all the stupid hair guides sorted and grouped, time for some expression testing!

Which also gives me a chance to fix weight maps. The auto-weight mapping does a pretty decent job, but it’s not perfect and touchups around the place are usually required (like for some insane reason half the innermost wing membrane was associated with the little finger why).

Add the hair in the usual fashion.

By default the hair will just sprout wherever. To restrict it to a certain part of the mesh, create a vertex group in vertex paint mode, and then use the group you created as a density map (found at the bottom of the particle panel).

On the SAME LAYER (this is very important, I say because it completely stuffed me for a ridiculously, laughably long time), shift+A and add a curve (I ended up using nurbs as from my extremely quick experimentation it seems to animate the fastest, but any curve will do the job). Adjust the curve to stick one end on the surface of the model, and drag the rest out as long as you need with as many points as you need.

I still haven’t worked out whether it’s better to keep a regular update even if it’s “I’m an idiot and got stuck again” or just not say anything if I’m that stuck.

So after combing the hair into the right shape, I found out a few things.

• while the collision detection works really nicely in particle edit mode, it completely fails when actual physics is applied, because for whatever reason the emitter collision is completely ignored
• I can’t work out for the life of me how the hell to rig particle hair

I’ve done spline IK for the tail rig so was trying to do something similar with the hair but don’t understand how particle weights work. Wasn’t the biggest leap to find out about curve guides, and then took me the better part of forever to work out that curve guides had to be on the same layer as the particle emitter to work. Once that was sorted out, I then spent way too long playing around with the different curve types to work out which one would be the best for the job. Seems that nurbs animates quickest so that’s what I’m using.