technonaturalist

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.

Error riddled but I’m calling it done so I can move along with other things. Like characters and sets and maybe more paintovers. Least my arm rig works which was the purpose of the exercise!

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

One of JJ’s friends recently hosted a science themed birthday party for his 7yo, complete with science experiments.

First up was lemon batteries. They had fun poking various pieces of metal into the lemons and then tried to light a small LED from it.

Unfortunately the lemons didn’ put out enough power to light the LEDs on thi occasion (it had apparently worked when JJ’s friend was testing out suitable experiments for the party). They moved on to the next thing while JJ used a metal coat hanger to skewer some of the lemons into a parallel to see what kind of charge he could get and apparently we’d need quite a lot of lemons to get one small LED to turn on.

10yo: can I do memrise?
Me: no. Go to sleep.
10yo: por favor?
Me: no. Go to sleep.
10yo: can I go give Daddy a cuddle?
Me: no. Go to sleep.
10yo: por favor?
Me: na go’i ko sipna
6yo: what does that mean?
Me: no. go to sleep!

I wanted to wrangle the permission attitudinal in there but couldn’t recall it off the top of my head. Also needed an .i but eh.

This house is more Menagerie than The Menagerie was. Newest additions from left to right: Popcorn, Lucius and Nightshade (which may actually be Knight Shade as I suspect it was named after a Skylander), belonging to 8yo, 10yo and 6yo respectively. We’ve had them for three days so far and they’re settling in slowly. Cats completely do not care about them. Tali has sniffed them both in the cage and in my hand and been great. Angus just wants to bite them. Which then of course stirs Tali up and he wants to play too! Working on that -_-