Remembering things is quicker than learning things from scratch, but I still hate uv mapping. I’m also so very tired and so very glad that I made a very early decision to never pitch this thing given the amount of hate 3d gets. If I’d been doing it for anyone other than myself I would have probably given up long ago.

Another late start today as I had a bit of laundry to do (though I did get eldest to get it off the line for me in the evening as I found outside too cold) and also spent a bit too much time catching random episodes of Demon Slayer (article contains spoilers) with 17yo who was recovering from a head cold. But at least the hands are done. Connecting the wings to the body was a bit tricky but got there eventually and didn’t take as long as I thought it would. What took longer (and pushed me past bedtime again) was deciding I needed to do the wing membrane texture RIGHT NOW because I don’t even know why anymore.

Closing meshes is on the long list of things I hate. Okay I don’t actually feel strongly enough to hate it, but it is annoying when things don’t just close nicely. The last membrane and finger went pretty quickly and smoothly, which somewhat made up for the super late start caused by house discussions. At least I was able to get some work done, we had been going to turn the power out so that some cabling could safely go into the roof.

Part 1 happened over the course of weeks or months a couple of decades ago when I migrated to Drupal from livejournal (I didn’t really note how long it took partly because I wasn’t interested at the time and mostly because I was trying to get through that cringey era as quickly as possible). though it has been interesting watching my tone change from when I was blogging every little thing and basically talking to my friends on livejournal, to still kind of doing that but realising that people I didn’t know were also reading my blog at some point shortly after migrating to Drupal, to kind of just talking to a void/audience that may or may not be there, to mostly talking to myself and occasionally addressing the potential audience or specific people Part 2 started a few months ago after I finally (after way too long because I am nothing if not unreasonably stubborn) accepted the fact that I’ve been really, really struggling to keep on top of Drupal updates alongside everything else. By stupid dumb luck I saw hugo mentioned in an article on one of my feeds (the author was migrating their site from Drupal 6 to hugo from memory) and went and had a look.

The last week of May saw a bunch of random and mostly unrelated setbacks and I’ve been trying to frantically catch up ever since. This morning was icing as a dead tree fell onto the neighbour’s house. We heard the crack of the trunk breaking as it fell, thought it was thunder, and then knew something was up when we heard the impact and scurried out to investigate. Nobody was injured but their roof is going to need some repairs. Spent a big chunk of the morning helping them to clean up and joking about how none of us had had a chance to have our coffee yet.

Tha gap isn’t even that big but that’s what it feels like right now. The wing membrane is being a pain in the system. And I thought I was going so well too. I attempted combining with a previous version where I’d tried bordering with triangles and eventually got this monstrosity which I hated but less than the other ones.

Finally managed to get past the last stuck point. I’m somewhat pessimistically wondering how far away the next one is. I managed to finish the wing arm and the membrane and was concentrating really hard on making sure that the membranes (which will be distorting the most) were as squared as possible and doing the best I could with everything else (inevitably the arms turned into rectangles including around joints where I really would have preferred more squares).

And I’m tired and I’m so far beyond sick to death of constantly redoing things that I’ve already done. I’m recovering from a head cold (which set in because I chose to go to work and cover for people who were actually full on sick when I could feel it coming and is taking its sweet time buggering off because I couldn’t just rest up on the days that I had to do so) so had not much in the way of concentration and spent a lot longer staring at nothing with greater frequency than usual. Things are coming together to some value of coming together.

During my manual migration I have been cringing at all my old artwork and rediscovering a few gems such as part of a conversation I had with one of my friends about 3d back in 2013. They said: Lol shame there is not one 3d app to rule them all that does ALL the things and is moddable to suit the individual’s work flow I replied i would like One App that had a workflow and was split like Lightwave (though there’s thought of unifying Lightwave, i was really pissed about it when i first heard about it, then more recently now that i’m better at this stuff i realised i don’t care if they unify it as long as the workflow doesn’t change too much and i can still box model) with a scupt mode as awesome as Sculptris that also integrated animatable sculpting/morphs like ChronoSculpt and had cool retopo tools like ZRemesher from ZBrush or BSurfaces from Blender and a dynamic paint mode like Blender or Sculptris but probably easy like Sculptris but that can update UVs on the fly and a rigging toolset that’s easy as either Genoma in Lightwave or whatever Blender has (haven’t tried but apparently good) and definitely less crashy than Genoma deep breath in

I would have really, really, really liked to have had this thing done and dusted and been moving on to the next bit by now but it persists in being relentlessly annoying. But I got onto a roll over the last couple of nights (which as my rolls usually do resulted in me forgetting to go to sleep) and made some headway. Most of my problem was having two direction changes very close to each other.