I deliberately didn’t post a progblog last week as I was having a minor tanty about how nothing had changed. Nothing much has changed still, I continue fighting to square up the mesh but it’s working out better with more mesh for more context. To some value of better. My DE of choice got upgraded to KDE6 which is mostly great for the most part. I had to swap out my theme switcher (Yin Yang) because it didn’t want to work under Wayland. Minor issue I’m having is that its replacement (Koi) doesn’t always automatically switch (it mostly does but not always and I don’t know why) and doesn’t switch the Konsole colours.

Last week was “interesting”. I found out (from deviantART via another friend of hers who found out from a mutual friend of theirs on Facebook, which is how I’d suspected for a long time I would find something like this out) that an online friend that I have been talking to almost daily for the last couple of decades had died apparently on Christmas Eve. We had been chatting the week or so before, and she had told me at some point not long before then that she suspected she was cancer-riddled and that her organs were starting to fail and she probably didn’t have long left (she suspected cancer quite a while before then but was so terrified of hospitals she chose to just die from it rather than seek treatment, and the myriad of health issues she’d had throughout her entire life probably played a part in that decision too). I don’t know what the actual cause of death was.

We apparently have to use lesson plan templates this year which has increased my admin time a little bit (I now have to translate it into the template to send to my boss instead of just exporting a pdf like I was before). This would have been fine if LibreOffice hadn’t decided that it wasn’t going to play nice with the template and I had to rebuild the damn thing so I could use it which took a bit of doing.

you could have done so much more if everything had actually gone according to plan. I’m resigned to using my tablet as a tablet partly because I didn’t want to pack it away again and redownload the Wacom drivers and reset my desk setup for the Wacom and mostly because I just want to use the shiny new thing. The most it’s done is the occasional mapping whenever I get obsessed over around to it.

In contrast to characters, furniture is relatively quick and easy to do. Though I did have a massive brainfart moment and temporarily forgot how I’d done woodgrainesque textures as it’s been a while. after I remembered that despite its distinctly woodgrainy appearance I wasn’t supposed to use a Wave Texture, I was supposed to use and distort a Noise Texture, then it came back Sprat and I joked about warning kids with tails to not mess around on the chairs (the usual thing of don’t swing on them etc) and then them falling over and getting their tails kinked and getting stuck in the chairs after falling and having unsympathetic caregivers yelling TOLD YOU.

Silly Season Shenanigans set a precedent apparently, as the first progblog of the year is also late. I’ve been home for the holidays, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it 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 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

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).

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.

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).