technonaturalist

The problem with doing 3d or animation or 3d animation (for me at least) is that the works in progress shots can be exceedingly boring. I spent pretty much the entire streaming day yesterday finishing up the tail end of the rig test anim, and am currently letting it finish up a timing render which didn’t finish overnight because I forgot to turn Avi’s particles off. Oops.

I’m aware the feathers are being awkward, they will get folded down in the detail run (I need to figure out how to do feather controllers, or if there’s just a better way to rig them, they’re doing my head in). These are from the end of the test, where the three of them have a quick conversation while turning away from the camera (because I wanted to end with the My 3 pose) which then pans around to be in front of them (I do also need some panning practice).

Straight off the bat, nobody likes doing bookwork, not even the primary homeschooling parent (that would be yours truly). I have the books mainly so I know what they’re technically supposed to be doing if they were at school (and it would be a handy syncing device should they ever decide to go to school or if I need to chuck them in there for whatever reason). So I’ll be getting English, Maths and Science books from my usual source for these things once I have money to do so. We have been doing ChoreMonster on another homeschooler’s recommendation which has been working out better for longer than other things I’ve tried. However the bigs are getting to an age where I want them to be a bit more responsible with how they manage their time and the things that need to do (rather than me telling them what they should be doing and then nagging them because they don’t want to do it). To that end the bigs and I are now giving Habitica a go as we’re all gamers and roleplayers so the idea is a bit more appealing than the simple reward system that ChoreMonster is. The bigs have copied their bookwork into the daily list and the other chores into habits, and I’ve told them they can add whatever else they like. Unlike ChoreMonster where I assigned how many points each chore was worth, they can assign how difficult they feel each task is and reap the rewards (or the punishments if they fail to complete their dailies). We’re still in early days and change is hard on anyone, they currently don’t like it and want to go back to ChoreMonster possibly because the interface is a lot more complicated and there are in-game consequences for not completing tasks (the character loses health) and the sudden responsibility is a bit overwhelming. They have since added their own todos and habits and dailies on top of the ones I’ve given them and we’re on a quest to defeat the Dust Bunnies, and 12yo actually scarpered to bed when he realised what time it was as one of his habits was to be in bed by 9:30pm, so it might go all right.

I’m usually streaming on Picarto on Sundays after 12 and Thursdays from 9am-3pm AWST, though lion dance season is coming up which may throw the Sunday streaming a bit. I did a random ~4hr stream today as the in-laws have a busy week this week and decided to come today rather than not coming at all because they’re awesome like that, working on an Ingress wallpaper:

Yesterday I switched up between working on the Zul’jinn concept:

Stuff I was working on as the year ticked over (because we apparently don’t do parties anymore).

Still working on the rig test animation, just about at the end of the blocking phase and then I go back through with the detail phase (there should only be one but there will probably be 2-3 and me trying and probably failing to stop myself). The unofficial title of the above is “YOU IDIOT”. All will become clear when I get the render out XD D is average Dragonkin height (2m tall) but I think I made Avi and Base a little bit small, should have made them 1.7m instead of 1.6.

We didn’t get to do our Solstice Wreath this year due to a little more craziness than usual. But other stuff got done.

10yo figured out how to make fingerless gloves using her loomband loom and wool after watching a few Youtube videos:

She has since either given this one to her best friend or made her best friend one and there has been a request to teach another homeschoolie how to make them.

Because they’re apparently useful to have and I haven’t done one forever (seeing as I’ve spent so much time redoing things). Let’s try a 5 year plan.

2017

• character concept art for all characters in the first and second blocks
• come up with a name for the arc the first and second block are in (yes it’s been over a decade and it still doesn’t have a name). Episode names optional.
• build all of the things for the first ep
• make intro, outtro and trailers
• start writing second block
• continue writing Aidan’s blog
• possibly start writing script for Seamus’ storyline (comic)
• make AER website

2018

• build all the things for the second ep
• see if I can interest people enough to be voice actors and run auditions
• -record and animate first ep
• character concept art for every other character I know about. Yes, all of them.
• keep working on second block
• continue with Aidan’s storyline, start Seamus’ if haven’t already

2019

• with luck my build list should be a lot smaller now so should be able to build out everything else
• is the second block finished yet?
• run auditions for new parts or unreprised roles
• record and animate as many eps as possible to my ridiculous standards and assuming I have the hang of things by now
• start writing out C’inokh and Ter’wyn’s stories, decide whether they’re comic or animation

2020

• build/modify all the things for second block
• if possible build all the things for Seamus’ comic
• if possible start work on second block

2021

• have we finished animating and released the entirety of the first block yet?
• can we start producing the second block now?
• I suspect there might be a third block

The 2018 part of the plan involving finding voice actors actually terrifies me because that involves trying to find people who might be interested. I’m actually seriously bad at the marketing side of things as I prefer people to be interested if they find it interesting and feel like even resharing from Patreon and announcing Picarto streams is “too pushy” even though I have been told I’m probably actually not pushing it enough. Everything else is stuff I would be doing anyway. Trying to work out how to get sound into the video is similarly terrifying because I’ve never done it before.

Edited 2017 Jan 7: made the scripts slightly more reliable (not relying on window ids) but they will now get extremely confused if there’s more than one instance of Blender open

Because I’m not smart enough to get the MacOS version of the Automatic Scene Switching plugin for OBS Studio, I gumbied an easy manual one with bash scripts.

So there’s some scenes set up in OBS like so:

Set shortcuts for the scenes in OBS settings like so:

We haven’t really made good use of our zoo passes this year. Hopefully this will be remedied next year. 10yo stole my phone to take a number of photos of things she considered cute and as we ventured into the Asian rainforest to see the Komodo dragon and the red panda it reminded me that there are a few sections we don’t get to very often and we should probably make the effort to go into them.

I spent most of October being out with shingles and a chest infection. JJ managed to take some time off work during the worst of it but after that he was juggling full time work, homeschooling and generally running the house so don’t think he really remembers specifics of any of the homeschooling stuff they did.

Our bees swarmed, and made this nice ball that dangled off one of the fruit trees for a couple of days. We got a relative who is a bee keeper to come pick them up. In the meantime the kids were told to avoid that area, be generally careful while playing outside and I think had some bee-themed lessons from Youtube as both the boys started telling me a lot about bees and hornets shortly afterwards.

The Dragonkin build was relatively easier than the Avian one; the wing fingers were a little bit fiddly but there were only five of them as opposed to a million feathers and all one object as opposed to a million XD

The tail rig was an almighty pain. Firstly, the pitchipoy script couldn’t seem to recognise the bones if I did the tail the easy way (one big bone subdivided down into a million little ones). Or if they were extruded one from another. Long winded duplicate, move along Y a bit and then connect worked (but took ages). Then I tried using bone hooks which I’ve done before but I kept stuffing something or other up and the spline would end up either moving or stretching a long way and I couldn’t seem to find the right combination of settings to make it stop sucking. Then I found this other method that uses bone envelopes which did the job I was trying to do and was a lot easier to set up (one armature modifier vs a million hook modifiers). Except that I’d made the tail too short so I made it longer. Then realised I need the end of the tail to remain stiff as in the time period I’m writing in pretty much all the Dragonkin have weaponised tails (I don’t think they all did in their early generations, but I’ll deal with that if I ever have to make a Dragonkin with a plain tail). Apparently pitchipoy didn’t like me modifying the bone chain so I had to do it again. Ergh.