technonaturalist

I’m doing a reasonable job doing everything else and an atrocious job blogging.

Perth Zoo

While visiting relatives:

And now what follows is a ridiculous week in which we went to SciTech three times for homeschooling lessons for 10yo and 8yo, a stage play and we also squeezed in a trip to the museum on one of the Scitech days because everyone was in a good mood at the time (I won’t say anything about the trip home from that day).

Set up controller bones (I like them in their own Armature) and make sure the “deform” box in the bone properties panel is unchecked.

find it easier having the entire face moving around with the eye directional controller because I’m weird like that (and also they end up in odd places because of how I have the head controller).

When I did the head hair I did a scalp (copy of the…uh…scalp on the top of the head where the hair is growing out of shrunk down to fit just inside the head) with its own material to colour the hair strands because it was the easiest thing to do as the hair strands pick up whatever texture is applied to the geometry. Wasn’t too crazy about the extra geometry but couldn’t work out how everyone else on the planet had done it so crashed around the particle system and node tree til I got something going.

Earlier today:

JJ: (whispers to 6yo to put a banana into the pancake mix they’re making in the kitchen)
me (yelling from computer room): I can hear you from here.
6yo (stage whispering): Dad stop stage whispering!

Just then:

6yo: Dad can you give me a boost up for the stuff I’m biggenising?
JJ: …you want me to help you make that bigger?
6yo: yes please.

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

I have no idea what I’m doing (despite reading the internet).

I had to redo the hair emitters about a million times because I kept blowing something up (and not knowing what I blew up, but combing strands in Particle Mode is kind of amusing for a while). When I finally got that sorted my first test looked like a polyp colony.

When I eventually got something I liked I couldn’t work out how to get the red (which is actually supposed to be bleached but I just grabbed a random high constrasting colour at the time) to just be on the mohawk (probably needed a uv map) and then the fuzz on the side was playing silly buggers.

[2/06/2015 11:08:56 pm] ryivhnn: Chrome is pretty good about being up to w3c standards so it ignores a lot of the -webkit- stuff
[2/06/2015 11:09:05 pm] ryivhnn: Safari still needs a bit of help though coz it’s special
[2/06/2015 11:10:45 pm] Darqx: it’s just apple
[2/06/2015 11:10:48 pm] Darqx: apple is special
[2/06/2015 11:10:55 pm] Darqx: i am getting so sick of the apple issues at school OTL
[2/06/2015 11:11:42 pm] ryivhnn: LoL
[2/06/2015 11:11:45 pm] Darqx: LIKE MAVERICKS BEING SO SPECIAL THAT APPARENTLY WHEN SOMEONE TELLS IT THEY WANNA LOG OUT IT MEANS “YOU DONT REEEEALLLY WANNA LOGOUT HERE LET ME HELP YOU BY KEEPING SOME OF YOUR PROCESSES OPEN SO TECHNICALLY YOU’RE STILL LOGGED IN”
[2/06/2015 11:11:57 pm] Darqx: it’s so annoying
[2/06/2015 11:12:06 pm] ryivhnn: they’ll bring in Clippy soon. just wait.
[2/06/2015 11:12:14 pm] Darqx: it doesnt happen as often after i implemented the logout hook but occassionally still
[2/06/2015 11:12:15 pm] Darqx: omg
[2/06/2015 11:12:17 pm] ryivhnn: “it looks like you’re trying to log out! would you like some help with that?"
[2/06/2015 11:12:26 pm] Darqx: “LOL PYSCHE”
[2/06/2015 11:12:33 pm] Darqx: psychotic clippy
[2/06/2015 11:12:37 pm] ryivhnn: RoFL
[2/06/2015 11:12:50 pm] Darqx: Y O U C A N N E V E R L O G O U T
[2/06/2015 11:13:14 pm] Darqx: suddenly clippy mutliplies all of the screen
[2/06/2015 11:13:37 pm] Darqx: covers up the apple logo so you cant force quit
[2/06/2015 11:13:43 pm] Darqx: the spinning beach ball happens
[2/06/2015 11:13:52 pm] Darqx: you try and shut the computer down
[2/06/2015 11:14:19 pm] Darqx: but every time you turn it back on it’s just your frozen screen with clippy staring at you like @u@
[2/06/2015 11:14:47 pm] Darqx: you’ve tried throwing the computer away but it keeps appearing on your desk the next day
[2/06/2015 11:15:02 pm] Darqx: one night you run over it in your car and bury it in a landfill
[2/06/2015 11:15:03 pm] ryivhnn: bahahahahaha you should write it as a pasta XD
[2/06/2015 11:15:15 pm] Darqx: but then you wake up the next morning AND THERE IT IS, AT THE FOOT OF YOUR BED. CLIPPY. CLIPPY
[2/06/2015 11:15:38 pm] ryivhnn: or just do it your way and have it as an amusing and vaguely horrifying comic
[2/06/2015 11:15:48 pm] Darqx: the next morning they find your dessicated corpse with the words YOU ARE NOW LOGGED OUT written in blood on the wall behind you

When I’m not finding UV mapping agonisingly quirky, I’m being frustrated by Blender’s borderline unusable viewport lagginess at 2.2M polys. There is some progress being made. UV mapping was interesting as I couldn’t figure out how to project onto part of a mesh like I’ve done previously in Lightwave so I ended up mapping the entire object om question. For the shirt I just painted the whole thing and ued minimal nodes for colour and bump maps. For the tattoos and face markings I stuffed around a hell of a lot with the skin shader and eventually got them on there but it now means I have blue freckles instead of dark brown.

Photos from the last couple of weeks. After 10yo had sent off an enquiry email to WAFFS, they put is in contact with a lovely lady in the area who let us play with her ferrets and answered all the questions we had and then said we should head up to the AGM the following day if we didn’t have any plans as people brought their ferrets to these things. We didn’t have anything on that morning (unfortunately parents in law were off travelling so we couldn’t visit them while we were in the area) so we trotted along to go have a look.

My iMac is about three years old. It’s kicking along fine, as long as I don’t do anything too hardcore in the 3d department. We’re having slight issues there, as in Blender starts lagging and acting strangely (like failing to realise that I’ve “released” when the pen is off the tablet) when it has to deal with over 2M polys.

This is the machine I want to get:

Mac Pro

• 2.7GHz 12-core with 30MB of L3 cache
• 64GB (4 x 16GB) of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC
• 256GB PCIe-based flash storage
• 2x AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM
• Apple Thunderbolt Display (27-inch)
• 3 year warranty

Unfortunately I don’t have $14 197 kicking around (and if I did I wouldn’t after I’d dropped it onto the mortgage). It goes down to $12 097 if I go down to the 3.0GHz 8-core with 25MB of L3 cache and $9 997 if I settle for the 3.5GHz 6-core with 12MB of L3 cache. Additionally I’d have to get some extra drives for storage because I opted for the smaller built in drive with the intention of expanding externally. Ideally I’d like one of the Pegasus RAIDS that you can get bundled with it but unfortunately I’m not yet a proper studio with a budget for these things (as is I’m lucky to be in a position where I can start scraping together money for the next machine as soon as I’ve bought one as it takes about that long to save up, but sometimes other things like unexpectedly large vet bills or planning on buying another house and moving into it can interfere with that).

6yo: Daddy you’re from Satan!
JJ (laughing): How’d you work that one out?
6yo: Coz you’re a DEMON!

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