Farewell 2017, happy 2018!
I did my usual and had a drink while 3d-ing. I probably should have taken a photo of the drink for the benefit of the steem crowd but didn't. JJ piked out but the kids stayed up with me (probably for the novelty of staying up til midnight as 8yo's bedtime is 8, and the big two at 9:30). Despite procrastinating for pretty much the entire day I managed to finally close the retopo and have started painting.
I was supposed to do this before Silly Season kicked all the way in and...well I'm in some downtime before it arcs up fully so here we go XD
Retopo is going slowly and painfully as per usual. I just have to finish the wings and then I can start painting, and hope that my retopo job isn't completely crap and that he animates all right. Then after that I have to fix the rig and give him some hair and then maybe have a little fun while I work out who I'm doing next.
Haven't really had a chance to work much on this lately, always other things demanding attention (and apparently I'm not supposed to take time out of sleep to make up for it but that's pretty much all I got left).
Tail retopo is driving me up the wall a little bit, I had quite a few goes before I got a mesh I'm vaguely happy with. What I wanted was to just draw the mesh and smoothe it later but apparently my lines were so terribly wonkered that I need to fix everything before I can proceed.
Switch on the sky and the stars glow for you
Go see the world coz it's all so brand new
Don't close your eyes coz your future is ready to shine
It's just a matter of time before we learn how to fly
Welcome to the rhythm of the night
There's something in the air you can't deny...
Saving as a png ate my colours again. I really need a 16bit image format that browsers can understand.
This one is from last Thursday! A lot of stuff happened that prevented solid work on it so it ended up getting dragged out for the entire week! And then I didn't stream this Thursday because other stuff had to happen. But we got there eventually! In this one I finish off High and continue working on Red. Digits are my nemesis (yes I have several of them).
Track list
Engagement present for @jedau and @randomli.
I was going to do my usual little ficlet to go with this one but Jed has something in mind so I don't want to clash, and also I don't actually know Aurelius' wife's name XD (actually up til Jed got attached to him I didn't know a whole lot about him). They have some cute babies though XP
I was thinking about throwing some text in there but I couldn't think of anything poignant or even intelligent to write, and also realised that I'd have to change the composition if I included text as it would unbalance otherwise.
ahhahahahahaaa listen to me sound like I know what I'm talking about
So then I thought about putting some clouds in there as they're fun to paint, but had the same problem as with the text and besides which I want them to have cloudless skies together (metaphorically ie a long and happy life).
Last Thursday stream as I'm switching to Fridays next week or so (whether I'll manage next Friday is another thing as Sprat is up on holiday so we've been hanging). Decided to stream despite not having backup as I was going to be busy doing other things on the Friday when I did have backup so decided to continue working on @jedau and @randomli's engagement present.
I started on an engagement present for @jedau on Wednesday, and decided to continue it on Thursday so of course it got streamed.
Did something slightly different, instead of just cutting a piece out of each track as usual, I axed anything that wasn't sappy, upbeat, uplifting or didn't have lyrics I could use and used slightly longer samples than otherwise. The first and last tracks are still the first and last tracks (and in fact the first track was the inspiration for the piece as well as what I thought of when I read Jed's dramatised recount of the proposal to his girlfriend). The ending is rather abrupt because I was pretty tired by that point and my computer was playing silly buggers.
Track list:
@jedau over on Steemit took a bit of a shine to Aurelius in the Black Fingernails Red Wine piece due to name similarities, and these gems came up in the course of our conversation:
Haha! Definitely make him look like a Quokka :D
And
Oh right!! They're native to Australia haha! Man, I wish I had those things as pets haha! Maybe add in a scar across Aurelius left eye to give him that sort of intimidating presence. When people ask how he got it, he'll think of some awesome story, when really it was because he slipped while getting a midnight snack and hit his face on the corner wall.
Do you have any idea whatsoever how impossible it is to make a quokka look intimidating? Even when they're a therio? It's that nose. I can't work under these conditions! XD
Who would have thought that editing a 6 hour video would take longer than a 3 hour one? Additionally I had some fun and drama with KDEnlive, apparently its annoying settings are per project; I had to specifically tell it to use most of my cores for rendering as it kept trying to use one and overheating my computer which caused it to hang and made me mad. And even after telling it to use 7 threads (so I could have one to do stuff with) as it turned out I had to just sit and let it do its thing all by itself as if I attempted to use my computer while it was rendering something would violently overheat and then the computer would hang.
If it keeps that up I'm not sure how I'm ever going to render out episodes. Good thing I'm not planning any feature films!