technonaturalist

Starting work on my entry for The Great Pokemon Sky Race Collaboration. I need to do another version of 3d-fyn (because the last one blew up while I was fiddling with something, probably the rig, and then I reworked Base’s rig anyway) as well. 3d-fyn will be riding Flashwing (pidgeot from my Pokemon Yellow game) in mega-evolution (I think mega evolutions are kinda dumb really, however mega-pidgeot form is theoretically big enough to carry 3d-fyn otherwise we’d need an enormous pidgeot).

Do you know how hard it is to do a coast to hills transect with three kids under 12?

Not that hard actually if you go with their interest levels. I would have liked them to observe how the vegetation and soil changed as we went from the eastern outer metro to the coastal part of the Wheatbelt. They were mostly interested in getting to the beach so we just ended up pointing out sand dunes that were covered in vegetation and having quick chats about why the vegetation is important for holding the sand together, and how the soil colour changed from browny-red clay to sand to white sand.

I am a terrible parent.

6yo has actually been 6 for a while. Doing the birthday post got lost in the shuffle partially due to general life busy-ness and mostly because his birthday celebration was quiet and laid back by his choice. We didn’t go anywhere as all he wanted was for his best friend to come over and play Skylanders. He had a couple of friends come over and they all played Skylanders. He apparently wants a Skylanders cake next birthday as we didn’t manage one this time round.

The poses are exactly the same, just the camera angles are different, and it changes the entire feel of the piece.

I couldn’t decide between the screencaps initially so I polled it. Quadrapop, Chappie and 8yo voted for the first one, Sprat voted the second one and did a massive artistic crit in capital letters when she found out she’d been outvoted. I then lined the second one (I don’t call it inking unless the lines will actually stay on the piece), and because I draw pretty quick when I’m drawing over something I then drew over the second one for the hell of it. Gives me a bit more to think about when choosing camera angles anyway.

8yo has made it into the “Sunflowers” group which is a group of Level 2 girls who the coaches decide are good enough for competitions. Level 3 is the official competition level for the PCYC clubs (I have no idea about in general) so the Level 2 girls get to go along to the comps for fun and get a medal based on their overall scores. 8yo participated in her first comp and got a silver.

JJ and 6yo are making pancakes, 6yo searches the fridge for toppings.

6yo: Dad! I can’t find any jam! JAAAAAAAAAAAM! WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME?! Oh wait here’s some, never mind.

This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

Every now and again I need to do a test render to show myself some progress, because laying out feathers is very tedious. Right wing only has flight feathers, left wing has two layers of underside coverts (the second layer is incomplete) and I’ll figure out how to do the downy feathers later. In the interests of speed I set it to render only one child per strand, this one took about 15mins. 5 children per strand looks better, when I have the time and the inclination I’ll compare it to 20 (which was what I was using originally before there were too many feathers) and see if the extra children is worth the jump in render time.

The good thing about drawing is that you can blithely say that your character has a 20m wingspan and still draw them folded up neatly against their backs in the pose everyone expects, which is something similar to my short-armed redo which had a roughly 5m wingspan:

Unfortunately it doesn’t work as well in 3d! After getting the opinions of family and friends I settled on the 7m wingspan. Quadrapop wondered how to keep the feathers off the ground, I incorrectly said I’d investigated and the 5m and 7m wingspans cleared the ground. the 5m ones did easily due to the shortness of the arms. the 7m ones use the same length feathers as the 5m ones but the arms are longer, and I initially folded the feathers down wrongly in my initial super quick test. So when I actually did the proper furling morphs I ran into a slight problem:

I can’t remember how I came about my original calculations but I worked out that a 1.8m tall (because that’s how tall my base model is, no other real reason) Avian should have a 10-12m wingspan. Because I didn’t want to make the wing arms too big (because heavy plus looked stupid past a certain point) I managed to end up with 3m long primaries.

For comparative purposes one with a 7m wingspan (made the wing arms longer but used the feathers I’d done originally, didn’t zoom in for size comparison):

Reasonably weight mapped chicken wings.

Which I think looks a lot better than the Lightwave model I did five years ago (weight mapping was probably still a work in progress here or at least I hope it was, I can’t remember now):

And now comes with primary, secondary and tertial flight feathers.