technonaturalist

Though I’m sure I’ll find more things to clean up and refine while I’m doing the rest of the body.

Anyway I tried to reflect nature somewhat with some horizontal bands like what’s found in kudu (what I based Red’s horns off):

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]

We spent most of the last week recovering from whatever plague we had and trying to get back into the bookwork. What this meant was that we stayed home all week and I let the kids do whatever books they wanted which meant 6yo only did Reading Eggs books all week when they are supposed to pick different subjects.

While sculpting horns I was quite sure I was going to use Blender for all the sculpty goodness seeing as it had actually imported the mesh to begin with. I think I’m going to have to accept the fact that my brain is never going to play nicely with Blender because even though I have been doing so much better than I ever have, I still don’t understand it.

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]

Back in Perth now and this post is going to be a long one.

The holiday has been great because I was home and crap because in the second week, I got a swollen gland or lymph node that pressed onto the nerve of one of my back teeth and caused a LOT of pain and made eating difficult, and the kids got sick. In the third week the kids recovered and I got sick (two days completely out of action and just general misery, persistent headache and neverending mucous production for the rest of the week and continuing as I type). I am feeling slightly bitter about it and thinking it’s brutally unfair but at least I stayed there the entire time unlike a certain Christmas where I got medevac’d.

I’d told the 4yo to go and rest up prior to a planned outing as he’d power chucked from the dining table to the back door at lunch time and we wanted to make sure he was okay for the trip (which didn’t eventuate as he was still coughing in a manner that had us paranoid that he might do it again).

I heard screaming matches between him and the 8yo and walked in, found the 4yo lying on the bed looking sleepy and upset and the 8yo playing his DS. Told off the 8yo for antagonising the 4yo (he protested, but he has been antagoising his siblings for the past couple of days). After giving the 8yo a serve I again told the 4yo to lie there and rest up and as I was walking out he smiled and said “Ahhh nothing is sweeter than victory.”

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]

My suspected real life Crazy Dog House on the Cliff allegedly contains a museum these days. For various reasons we’ve never quite manged to get to it. Apparently neither have my parents, but as it turns out the opening hours are really awkward and you need to either be a tourist or taking time off work to go to it within the very short opening hours (Thursday and Friday 10-3).

I got stuck in “after I finish this bit” loop again when I thought about taking screenshots.

Repairing the twists in the horns (following the spline guides mostly worked though near the top some of the twist is wrong and is being corrected) and rounding out some bits that are too thin (and that I couldn’t see as a problem when I was doing the spline guides because there were a billion guides, and only noticed as I was edging upwards). Also making the ridges and whatnot more prominent and varied so it looks more organic (hopefully) and less plastic. I was originally intending on making the horn ridges bump maps rather than geometry, and will have to see how I go on the other characters but I have a feeling it’s going to look better as geometry so will just bite the render time seeing as I’m not making a game :)

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]

It’s been mostly overcast with bouts of rain so the last week has been kind of slack and kind of relaxed. We’ve been three times to two different beaches (though I didn’t take photos of the second beach partially because it was late when we went and I wasn’t sure how good the photos would turn out in that light, and mostly because I was going to be swimming as well, could have given it to my dad though), one loopy nature trail (which was slightly longer than I thought but a decent walk nonetheless, and we didn’t go to the lookout because it was probably too long a hike for the kids) and a few epic Minecraft sessions. I haven’t got as much art done as I was hoping but bits and pieces are getting done. The kids have been watching a LOT of Pokemon, a couple of other movies and reading books borrowed from the library (independently during the day in the case of the bigs; they each have a book on dinosaurs and 8yo has one on space and 6yo has a cookbook in addition to books selected for bedtime stories) as well as playing outside on the play equipment Nanny and Granddad are spoiling them rotten with, and looking at the fish in the pond.

It was slightly overcast and we almost didn’t go thanks to a (relatively) minor allergic reaction I had to lunch, but we got there and it was good.