January ProgBlog #1: (not) working (much) with (a lot of) distractions

Silly Season Shenanigans set a precedent apparently, as the first progblog of the year is also late.

After finishing silly season shenanigans and homeschool miscellany (the two things that had a time limit) I was finally able to get back onto the Avian base model. For a change everything progressed relatively quickly despite the poor little MacBook Air struggling (it was enough to convince me to aim for the Framework 16 instead of the 13, the idea of the graphics module won me over despite the 13 being my vastly preferred form factor).

Happy silly season 2023

Happy slightly late silly season!

A little bit late due to a combination of family shenanigans and whatnot, forgetting how to draw, doing a different method, realising that method would take too long, attempting to draw again, finally remembering how to draw and then trying to blitz it out around everything else in by then one day left, stymied slightly by a very fun new year party and actually finished it on time but then when I went to export it Krita and/or the MacBook started playing silly buggers and insisted on giving me blurry images and so I airdropped it to sibling dearest to see if she could work something out. She couldn’t get it to resize nicely either and after trying to work out if it was a brush problem or a Mac problem she ended up taking a screenshot and sending me that, and that is what got uploaded at the end of the night x_x

November ProgBlog #1: I choose this

Because while it’s still not amazing it’s at least somewhat passable and it’s working out a lot better than the polydown (much easier to layer for starters).

I really, really, really should be doing separate systems for the body and the wings but I’ll fix it later (as there will probably be something better to fix/redo it with later) but meanwhile fortuitously the edge transitions to skin will actually look fine as the child hairs from the top looks conveniently like fluffy down (sadly it didn’t work upside down both ways I tried it but this is fine).

October ProgBlog #2: sunk cost fallacy

Stuff went super slowly again as states happened (everything went well) and I dithered around trying to fix the feather patterning (including readjusting a lot of the feathers that got displaced and put everything else out of whack when I fixed the underlying mesh, I really should know better by now that while other people can get away with not doing things I never can) and flatten things out a little bit.

October ProgBlog #1: muddling not-Monday

Screenshot of a render because I was too lazy to save out the actual render. Did it as a test partly because Blender is apparently slightly less likely to crash if I do renders as opposed to the viewport preview and mostly because it’s been a while since I did one and I have to do one every so often to make sure things looks how they’re supposed to look (the viewport render is pretty accurate but is also deliberately lower quality than even my preview renders).

September ProgBlog #1: everything sucks

August sucked almost but not totally completely.

I think I did peck a bit here and there but didn’t really have time to sit down and actually work on anything, and even then not enough got done that I felt was worth the effort of writing about.

And then I nearly missed September too for many and varied reasons.

At one point I cracked it with the top of the wing being too pointy and went through and did the point by point modifications I’d been studiously avoiding and desperately hoping I could juust cover over with the feathers, because it didn’t enter my stupid head that the feathers kind of needed to follow the underlying form. Most of that comprised of just making most of the quads more planar (grey, some of them had to stay coloured/non-planar as it’s a reasonably low poly model and making the quads grey would cause the form to be lost).

July Progblog #1: everything but the thing

New hardware!

I finally got a new cpu and logic board…and some unexpected new ram as J accidentally bought a logic board that required ddr5 ram instead of ddr4 which was what I had.

The upside of that was I got a massive upgrade (as I asked him to double the ram when he was buying new ram and he actually did) and we accumulated enough parts to put together a machine from the leftover parts for middle child.

June ProgBlog #2: thought track

A new problem arose. I have this song in my thought track:

and I found out from comments on that video that there is a version with vocals.

And it has beautiful lyrics.

June ProgBlog #1: the folly of everythinging

Currently as I type, I’m pecking at Yet More Freaking Feathers, hive, lesson planning and somewhat trying to finish my Mekton character for a game which I’m not sure when it’s going to start as I haven’t heard much of anything other than some issues with mech building since it was proposed, but I did say at the time that they could start without me (and I would jump in if/when appropriate if they started without me) as at the time I wasn’t sure if I would be able to play or not.

May ProgBlog #2: sulking

That’s what I’ve been doing for the past ages because I’ve been wasting a lot of time playing stupid phone games because stuff happens in the games unlike in real life where it feels no matter how much effort and hours you pour into something, absolutely nothing at all gets done.

My parents happened to be up for Mother’s Day as they had come over for a quick holiday (which of course involved catching up as much as we could as we only see them a couple of times a year) so sibling dearest coerced asked me to please get some flowers and she would send a hamper of goodies.