The plane managed to land (rather heavily by the sound of things) despite the dubious weather on Christmas Island, and we made it back in the appropriate number of pieces just in time for what sounds like a proper lockdown, it seems. Seriously though why do people insist on hoarding toilet paper. Well, one week extra planning I guess, and I have to reschedule two appointments. The extra planning time will be helpful as I will probably need to actually have a work schedule again so I can learn the nonsense I need to figure out this hive front end silliness.

As soon as Protective 3 had gone into cooldown, I started work on Acaedia, using Red and Zip to help with sizing. The Flyers (especially Dragonkin!) take up a lot of space and need a lot of space. I’m starting with the Royals’ apartment which is in the central tower. Each of the squares is 10x10m, the walls are 5m high.

The result of Sprat nagging me to draw. Red and Zip weren’t always this friendly. I kind of matched the image she finished while I was starting, and she also suggested I match with my previous Protective, so I did that too by doing a full body shot, otherwise my composition would have ended up more like which is a “slight” difference from Sprat’s composition as her characters are standing further apart and have a much less severe height difference.

Oof I haven’t done a progblog since the beginning of December and that wasn’t even a progblog, it was a noprogblog x_x So surprise surprise, the MacBook Air struggles with the kind of work I do. I had to keep toggling the particle hair on and off in Blender because adjusting things on my big rig was making that thing complain (it’s an i7 something or other with 32Gb of ram), the small rig was unusably laggy with the particles on.

Stuff is a mess right now. Don’t really want to talk about it as it involves other people (spoiler alert: nobody is dead yet and J and I are still together seeing as those are the things people seem to be jumping to). End result of that is my head went into interesting places that are hard to come back from and while I really tried hard to do some art to stabilise, well basically it didn’t work out, so buggerall got done.

October ProgBlog 3 is technically November ProgBlog 1 and just isn’t called as such because I was a seriously sleep deprived idiot at the time. Where I left off, I’d started on the hairs by doing the reasonably easy eyelashes and eyebrows first. Okay eyebrows are pretty easy, just make a density map and then comb. Eyelashes I always have to keep painting hairs on carefully and then combing equally carefully.

A bit of unexpected chaos happened on Friday and it kind of wiped me out. And then it was followed by a kind of busy weekend. Which of course means being up kind of late Sunday night (right now) trying to bang out a progblog like people actually care about or even understand my delirious blender rambling XD This week’s shenanigans involved trying to get the perfect bake once I figured out how to bake. I could not get the perfect bake and I suspect it’s either something to do with my cage mesh or blender is super aggressively caching something or some combination thereof. So in the interests of getting the hell on with it I managed to blunder my way to a good enough bake and hopefully I’ll figure it out down the line.

Missed a week again, oops :S I was supposed to post on the weekend I posted the last songpic but stuff happened, just not that. Over the last week I finally managed to finish the retopo and apparently it has 8k odd faces with the mirror modifier, more once the subd modifier gets turned on, and probably more again when I get around to applying the mirror modifier which will probably be pretty soon (after I version save XD). I then chucked a rig in it and tried it out.

In the spirit of failing to do more in the same amount of time, I ended up having to clean out the art cupboard (a job I’ve been studiously avoiding for the last 5 years, I also bought a cube shelf for it that fits a bit more perfectly than I thought it would) and will over the next week or so probably have to sort out the rest of the crap that I’ve been putting off and should have probably done during covid except that I took the opportunity to go hard on this thing instead.

The last week has been more about trying to fit more stuff in, so work hours keep getting cut more and more and more (because apparently I shouldn’t be cutting sleep for some reason). And then on Friday my problem shoulder exploded (either pinched a nerve or it decided to become a frozen shoulder, I will find out which presently I guess) because I had the audacity to…stretch (literally all I did was stretch upwards). By evening I was popping painkillers (I don’t take painkillers because I have an irrational aversion to them) so I could run kids to places they needed to be, yesterday it was less bad and today it’s less bad again but still there and still occasionally annoying.