Last night was an exercise in frustration. There was a bunch of chores to finish up, and then all I wanted to do was some art and to hopefully get the progblog knocked out before it got too late. Instead of spending a couple of hours being able to work solidly after putting youngest to bed (the two bigs had gone off on yet another sleepover), I ended up fiddling around with the material for Zara’s eyes in an attempt to make them reflective for maybe half an hour to an hour, and then the rest of the time trying to recover/work with one crash that happened during a test render (which is extremely inconvenient given this is what I got the rig for but sadly not that unusual) and a weird drama where the keyboard and mouse stopped being useful (both mouse and stylus would move the cursor but clicks were ignored, and all input keyboard was ignored except for switching terminals, and then it would work perfectly fine in another terminal) that resulted in me downing tools for the night (angrily hard shutting down the rig and leaving it off overnight which I don’t recall ever doing before).

Or: why fyn has a ridiculously comprehensive and detailed head universe. Like all good stories, it started off innocently enough. I finished eyebrows and eyelashes and did some super quickie expression tests: My lights are really close and pretty bright hence the intense reflection, if they’re still too reflective under normal lighting conditions I’ll have to fiddle with the node a bit more.

I was optimistic and tried but as expected it took me longer to ease back in than I wanted. And then I injured my right thumb cleaning the stove and had a couple of days where holding the pen was painful (but towards the end of Day 0 and yesterday I tried anyway, today was better). Currently working on trying to get Zara’s hair sorted. Took me a bit to remember how to x-mirror around the 3d cursor and even then because I hadn’t applied the transforms to the curves the mirrored copies were wonkered. Which was fine as I only wanted the same number of guides on both sides and didn’t want the hairstyle to be symmetrical, but it’s a bit of work adjusting.

I wasn’t sure if I would manage a silly season shenanigans this year but successfully squizzled one in. No story, just Taji and Rei spending silly season at the beach as a lot of people living along the coast of Australia do, and building a sandman because it’s summer. There was a bit of fun and games with this one as the dull mix brush (from a brushpack I downloaded) was feeling a bit awkward in one of the Krita point updates and I couldn’t work out why. I temporarily replaced it with a wet bristles brush but could not get my brain to cooperate with it. I ended up booting the wet bristles brush out of my popup palette and deciding to use the the basic brush (that I use to colour because it’s therapeutic even though selecting and filling areas would be a lot quicker) to cel shade which I haven’t done for literal decades. It didn’t look terrible.

Even though we haven’t gone away this Christmas and are only doing a couple of gatherings, I’ve still managed to completely fail to get anything worthwhile done when I have been able to do anything. Last night I fell into a pit and after my computer decided to randomly crash (again) and I had to redo a whole pile of work, I ended up not even attempting the progblog and just crawling into bed to sulk.

Most of this week has been taken up doing last second Christmas-related stuff that I’d forgotten (I’m pretty sure this is the first year I thought I better do a list for next year, in my defence it’s the first time I’ve had to keep track of enough people to require a list), so work fell by the wayside a little bit. I managed to start on the hair and rig the crest.

I shall do my utmost to keep up but this year silly season is seriously kerbstomping me x_x And I don’t think staying up late is helping that much but it feels like it is. We seem to be rigging all right, I did some big motions with limbs and turned her into a pretzel and here I was playing around with small expressions. Split the panels just so I could show the non-animators among us the puppet controls and the result.

What is this 5 weeks shenanigans. So pretty much trying to pick up where I was before I jumped back to do more retopo. That texture baking tool in 3dC is a lifesaver when you’re inept like me x_x The skin texture is now reasonable enough for in your face shots: And an in your face Eevee render as close as the clipping distance would let me get (I’m not even sure I have many if any extreme closeups like this):

After getting increasingly annoyed about how dense the mesh was becoming as well as general annoyance about having to do yet more rework and the fact that some things simply didn’t want to stay square, I threw that idea through a brick wall and decided to just extrude the nails like I was originally planning and hope it wouldn’t make a mess. Which meant first trying to get used to the extrude tool (press enter first, then move it, then switch tools because pressing enter again doesn’t drop it, I don’t even remember which program that habit came from).

That’s what the head is at the moment and I’m not even done. Wait what haven’t I done this already? Well yes I had, but while I was working on the skin shader and trying to work out if you can keyframe changes in nodes (which I’ll need for the procedural eye texture, and apparently yes you can though I will have to figure out how) I realised I should probably do fingernail and claw procedurals as well so I don’t have to keep repainting them each character, so I jumped back into 3dC to add actual geometry for the finger and toe nails, as previously they were being done entirely with normal mapping.