There's a bit going on again and it seems like youngest and I have crashed back hard into undesirable old habits (he's basically refusing to go to bed and staying up as late as possible and needing to incessantly natter at me while I'm trying to work, and I'm just staying up late because I work best at night and can get quite a lot done in a short space of time unlike during the day where I distract at the slightest movement of air especially when it's on things I hate (like javascript).

Javascript

The title is a cute mispronunciation youngest used to say for that word group when he was a toddler (circliar, triangliar, particliar...).

Circular is closer to where I'm getting. 

I'm really glad about this as for a moment I thought that I wasn't going to be able to fit everything into a circle.

Even if the middle bit (the rectangle where the crosshair looking 3d cursor is) is 40min long x_x

It is kind of 2-4 houses smooshed together.

And those Fliers take up ridiculous amounts of room.  As I keep saying.  Because even I can't believe just how much space they take up.

I managed to draw up a rough schedule to try and fit everything in, and am fully prepared to shuffle stuff around.  At the moment hive and Duolingo are my biggest time sinks, going well over the hour each I've allotted them; hive because it's hive and there's a bit going on plus I'm supposed to be moderating a couple of communities and I'm doing a terrible job even looking at them never mind anything else, Duolingo because I was finding it easy so I gave myself a challenge of getting to the next level each time instead of just doing one stack, and then got a thing where it wanted me to use the keyboard instead of the word bank, and I found out the hard way that I've been sight reading Chinese and Japanese and haven't actually associated many sounds with characters.

The plane managed to land (rather heavily by the sound of things) despite the dubious weather on Christmas Island, and we made it back in the appropriate number of pieces just in time for what sounds like a proper lockdown, it seems. 

Seriously though why do people insist on hoarding toilet paper.

Well, one week extra planning I guess, and I have to reschedule two appointments.  The extra planning time will be helpful as I will probably need to actually have a work schedule again so I can learn the nonsense I need to figure out this hive front end silliness.

As soon as Protective 3 had gone into cooldown, I started work on Acaedia, using Red and Zip to help with sizing.

The Flyers (especially Dragonkin!) take up a lot of space and need a lot of space.

I'm starting with the Royals' apartment which is in the central tower.  Each of the squares is 10x10m, the walls are 5m high.

The result of Sprat nagging me to draw.  Red and Zip weren't always this friendly.

I kind of matched the image she finished while I was starting, and she also suggested I match with my previous Protective, so I did that too by doing a full body shot, otherwise my composition would have ended up more like

which is a "slight" difference from Sprat's composition as her characters are standing further apart and have a much less severe height difference.

Oof I haven't done a progblog since the beginning of December and that wasn't even a progblog, it was a noprogblog x_x

So surprise surprise, the MacBook Air struggles with the kind of work I do.  I had to keep toggling the particle hair on and off in Blender because adjusting things on my big rig was making that thing complain (it's an i7 something or other with 32Gb of ram), the small rig was unusably laggy with the particles on.

I'd like to say I must have been whining about it more than I thought as Sprat nagged me to draw instead, but she is usually nagging me to draw instead. 

So I drew and this is what I'm working on at the moment.

Stuff is a mess right now.  Don't really want to talk about it as it involves other people (spoiler alert: nobody is dead yet and J and I are still together seeing as those are the things people seem to be jumping to).  End result of that is my head went into interesting places that are hard to come back from and while I really tried hard to do some art to stabilise, well basically it didn't work out, so buggerall got done.

Literally buggerall of anything got done.  No art (hence the name of this post), no moderation work for OCA, barely any housework, definitely not the photobooks which I wanted to start on last month because I'm not sure about postage times due to some pointless virus, not much of anything.

October ProgBlog 3 is technically November ProgBlog 1 and just isn't called as such because I was a seriously sleep deprived idiot at the time.

Where I left off, I'd started on the hairs by doing the reasonably easy eyelashes and eyebrows first.  Okay eyebrows are pretty easy, just make a density map and then comb.  Eyelashes I always have to keep painting hairs on carefully and then combing equally carefully.

And then had to tone things down a little so that they didn't look like oil painting strokes.

_{Only vaguely related, I have read about someone using hair particles as oil painting strokes previously but they were asking questions about it and I didn't see the outcome.}

Then there was a system update which let me use my gpu for rendering again, yay!

And then I actually tested hybrid mode and it was about 20 seconds quicker on my test render.

Something along these lines.

Along with my usual "I don't really feel like I've done enough to be worth a progblog" silliness, it's been a crazy few weeks.  Sprat came up late for her yearly holiday after being uncertain about whether she'd be able to come up at all (she normally comes during the July school holidays) and did all the Christmas shopping, which basically meant hitting the shops almost every day for a couple of weeks.  She eventually managed to get it all done.

Then this weekend I had to supervise a weekend long teenager party (long annoying story).