Ear wip

Good enough for now, I’m sure I’ll fiddle with it more as I go. Was going to post a much earlier wip and of course it was “after I fix this, and do this bit, and what the hell is that, and…” now it’s mostly done.

I’m not sure if the model in my anatomy book has tiny ears, but if Red’s ears look massive it’s intentional, the Dragonkin inherited large pointy bat-reminiscent ears from the Chiropterans who went extinct a thousand or so years before the timeblock I’m currently working in.

Twisty horns from hell

I’m really glad I’m doing Red first. After spending six months of manual labour on his horns (because I have no idea how to magically make it work) the other characters (none of which have horns that twist this violently) will seem rapid by comparison.

I also don’t think I’m going to forget to model the subpatch cage as close as I can before freezing. Fortunately for me Red’s body structure is not too dissimilar in proportion from the default Dragonkin’s, I did end up spending a lot of time on his face trying to get his nose and chin right.

Quickie insight into bek's thought process, or one reason why AR is taking an inordinate amount of time to get anywhere

I have a “family tree” in MacFamilyTree which contains a lot of family saplings as it contains every named major and minor character and several unnamed but otherwise important ones (such as parents of siblings, as you need to list parents to be able to link people up as siblings). The main part of the family tree seems to be tracing The Art from Taha’ne through Ter’wyn down to My’rai (currently the last descendant on the list, the character is about 8-10 in my head in his current state and I also have an idea of him as a teenager but only have snippets of story for him) which is rather entertaining as there is 1723 years between them. That’s a lot of characters even given that the Dragonkin live an average of 120 years.

AR notes: physical bitboins

Some people have made them. As far as I can tell from an extremely quick skim, they’re all round coins and bills, familiar looking money.

The current block I’m working in uses local currency and bitcoin for a global currency. While contemplating bitcoin and how it gets accepted/exchanged as readily as the local currency of any given area, I wondered if they had a physical version of it. Which then of course had me wondering how cool it would be if they were dice.

BlenderAdventures Pt 1

That would be Blender the open source 3d application not the kitchen appliance.

2012-06-22: I want to split out the Lightwave viewports and have one view on the big screen so I can see a big picture of what’s going on and work on smaller zoomed in sections on my Cintiq. Lightwave can’t do that. Wonder if Blender can because it’s all open sourcey and whatnot and it’s statistcally improbable that I’m the only person on the planet that would want to do such a ridiculous thing. Find out it can, download. Messed around a little with menus (most important thing was change the rotation thing from turntable to trackball so it would move in a way I was used to) and made a mutant cube.

Sunday lazy sunday

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]

Last night, I was on a roll. I went to bed slightly later than intended.

This morning, 3yo woke me up repeatedly. First, sometime before the sun came up. Then shortly after the sun came up and the blue light was caning my eyes. Then after the sun came up. And shortly after JJ staggered out of bed I did the same seeing as I couldn’t sleep anyway.

Funding, distribution and musings on my sanity (or lack thereof)

Business has been going pretty well. This is great, and it also means I haven’t had a chance to work much on AR. I’ve been proofing and editing the scripts in between banging my head against code and deciphering client requests, and spent a whack of Sunday working on Red, but I’m pretty sure at this stage that I won’t be ready to animate the first ep by the end of the year. I am refusing to have panic attacks about it.

Musings on The Cloud

[minor pseudonymising edits during Drupal to hugo migration for all the good that will do now]

And Zemanta gives me pretty cloud pictures like this one.

I’m actually talking about that cloud computing “fad” (seen the term tossed around to describe it, wonder if it’s a fad like Facebook and the internet in general is a fad).

A friend from work recently asked if I had a Dropbox account. I didn’t, so he asked if would create one so we could collaborate on some work I’m helping him out with (and as a bonus he’d get extra space for the referral). The Cloud is something I’ve been aware of but otherwise generally ignored until I had it almost literally shoved in my face by my Android tablet asking me if I would like to sync contacts and calendars and files into the cloud (both from Google and from ASUS, I said no). I ruminated a bit on it and then said yeh sure.

Sometimes I wish I was interesting...

Aside from a dialogue tweak to viii or ix, it’s been a good few months since I touched any of the last seven eps, which means it’s been a year or so since I touched the first seven. It’s that “done” that I’ve felt confident enough to send it to two people I trust implicitly to tell me whether or not it’s actually a load of crap, and if it’s not a load of crap, if anyone other than myself will be capable of understanding it (I’ve been doing it for that long it wouldn’t surprise me if there were patches where people would not have a clue what was going on but I know).

Not on track. Don't panic.

The scripts are still done (it’s been months and I still haven’t changed/edited).

I don’t know if I’m on track to be able to start animating by the end of the year. Just thought about the amount of work involved, there’s sound and voice actors and…I have a low level panic attack happening in the back of my brain somewhere which is making me think about hyperventilating but up here on the surface I’m calm and all is well and I just keep plugging and thinking about writing reviews for Lightwave 11 (I got a free upgrade because I bought 10 a couple of months ago which I thought was very awesome of NewTek) and gIMP.