July ProgBlog #3: haaaaaaaaaair

I successfully crunched a lot of roleplaying notes and even got a decent start on a couple of major npcs (I only write character sheets for major npcs, everything else gets made up on the fly as I need it) and…game on Sunday didn’t happen as one player was working (which we knew about) and the other one had a family thing on (which we found out when we pinged them to let them know we were going to be starting soon). I’ve since decided to try running that game as play by post on my Discord server, hopefully that will work out better for the people that keep consistently not making it, and also resolves scheduling issues I was having nicely (I can now run my planned weekly game on Sundays seeing as the fortnightly game is getting moved to pbp).

July ProgBlog #1

After last progblog I decided to break from doing the Avian model and work on the Dragonkin one for a bit. First level of panic was that the proportions were really different.

That calmed down very quickly when I remembered…I only need the wings and everything in that area was proportional enough.

I then took another deviation as apparently my base models did not have basic textures applied like I thought they had, so I did that with the ones I had already done. And while doing that I ended up transplanting a head (that would sound rather dodgy without context I think) as I’d apparently made some changes to the male model at some stage and all the fixes I’d done to the mouth on the female model really wasn’t working.

June ProgBlog #1: There was a gap

In that gap was a slightly unexpected new puppy (which I wrote a bit about in the homeschool miscellany and covid (not worth the ridiculously excessive fuss and the frantic stripping of as much freedom as possible in that space of time that was made of it, wouldn’t recommend the headache though). And then there was me figuring it wasn’t worth the blog because there hadn’t been much prog and trying to manage that and consistently failing as other things kept happening (not least of which comp season started).

May ProgBlog #2

I’ve made zero progress on Gundry as there is a checkbox which I think I need to tick in Particle Edit mode to make the bake show up so I can edit it, and it seems to be a guaranteed crash. So looks like at this stage unless the new hair system drops sooner than I’m expecting it, I pretty much have to go the curve guide/soft body route.

Which means trying to figure out why my curve guides refuse to stick to their bone hooks and putting up with hair flapping around in anime locks (which at least won’t be too terrible for this project because it’s kind of semi-anime anyway).

May ProgBlog #1

Decided to try particle feathers following this tutorial on BlenderArtists. Got about this far in

and realised that I will likely need different mapping on each side because of how the particles are distributing.

Tried a cheap and dirty method I’ve used before in a hurry, and it only looked slightly better now than it did then and only because I had slightly better understanding of the settings.

April ProgBlog 3: The Infernal Hair Continues

I thought I was on my last attempt. I was going to try a few more things, and then give up and make a million curve guides again and down the line nut out soft body on curves (I probably need to nut it out anyway).

The problem I was having was that it seems that regardless of whether or not the emitter (the entire character model in this case) was set to be a collision object or not, the hair would clip straight through it when I got it to drop.

April ProgBlog #2: INFERNAL HAIR

I feel like it’s an eternal struggle getting hair settings right.

Sometimes what feels like a slight movement in your hand makes for a huge settings change.

So it’s generally a good idea to hold shift (which scales everything up so adjustments are a lot more gradual). Then I have these issues of why is it like this and why are there random patches of hair.

April ProgBlog #1: speaking of ridiculous things

Poor Gundry is copping a lot of flak for his amazing hair.

I was hoping that Blender 3.1 would have better hair physics (or at least actually emitter deflect) and I would be able to let it flop and bake before attempting to style it but no such luck.

Unfortunately Blender crashed before I could get a screenie of the pathetic wispy hair that happened in one of my render tests before I remembered to change the hair settings (had accidentally set them to the very thin settings I use for eyelashes and eyebrows), so here’s a shot of unstyled luscious locks.

March ProgBlog #4: when you forget little things

Like changing the default root and tip settings for the hair (default root is set at 1m and I can’t remember what default tip is).

There is always something ridiculous in 3d.

At least that’s relatively easily fixed.

The hair is still on quick settings because I just wanted to see how it looked, for a shot this close I would switch to 3d curves which looks a lot better but takes a bit longer to render.

March ProgBlog 3

I’m on the third week of using Obsidian for a lot of things including organisation and I’ve worked out that the schedule I made for myself at the beginning of this year or end of last year or whenever it was does definitely work, it’s me that’s the problem (so about the usual).

I also kind of want to investigate what will blow up if I add markdown to the techno editor to make copypasta easier. But for now I have a plugin for Obsidian which copies markdown to html so moving the text is easy and it’s just the images that require a bit more extra work (actual uploading for techno, and copy link or in the case of collages, screencapping for hive).