So, not long ago in the grand scheme I found out one of my friends has breast cancer.  There is another skinhead mohawk pending once I get a moment.  More recently my grandmother died.  It's sad but she was just shy of 100 so it wasn't unexpected.  Tomorrow I'm on a plane to Melbourne, and will be home on Saturday.  This is mostly heads up that there may or may not be a progblog next weekend depending on how I'm feeling.

Progress-wise, well.  With the scales I was really going out of my way to avoid drawing them.  I figured once I got the hang of the scale brush everything would be sweet.  Well I decided eventually that I would just see what drawing them would look like.

Almost fell into old habits of not posting because I'm currently stuck in November as far as progress on stuff I was supposed to be working on (before getting massively sidetracked by the Rewrite the Stars songpic).

Now I had actually gotten a fair way further than this and was doing pretty all right when I realised two things. 

Yeh yeh I'm late again.  Much shenanigans happened on the weekend taking 11yo, a bunch of her giggly friends and 13yo to Bounce (9yo was meant to come to but he'd sliced his toe open on Thursday by deciding it was imperative that his iPad be unlocked on the way to the car rather than in the car after he'd clipped in and thus he didn't notice the kerb I'd parked next to), and then one of the girls stayed over (which I found out was happening on the day, fortunately I'm cruisy).

Also I didn't visibly progress as much as I wanted.  As far as the work is concerned well I'd love to tell you how any times my perfectionist tendency has kicked my sorry tail to the kerb repeatedly (aka I kept redoing the thing because I wasn't happy with something or other and because of how the scales intersect it was really hard just to remove the section that was causing the problem) but I've long since lost count.

I progressed!

`

I missed two aaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Anyway.  I'm currently stuck with the dance animation because the characters didn't end up where I wanted them to be due to a severely truncated tumble run.

I originally planned for Zara to do a proper diagonal with at least a slight run-up and 4-5 tricks.  Then I had a problem of Rei's tumble run being not nearly as long because she's just learning and doesn't know nearly as many tricks as Zara, plus she does a slower and more graceful one that doesn't utilise a run up.

I was actually intending to do this on Friday, but I was also setting up some new backup drives (my original drive was appropriated) and needed to copy the old backup from my computer (where it's currently taking up a HELL of a lot of space!) and I found out the hard way that I can't use 3d Coat and have big copy operations going at the same time because it makes my computer run out of memory.

Above is ram and swap usage with 3dC open.  Think it might have something to do with the 16k uv map I'm using.  I have 32Gb of ram.  I should probably get more.

Blender's viewport is massively outdated and exceedingly laggy.  This has made trying to correct the weights on the ~300k poly model of Red agonisingly painful and take way, way longer than it should be.  I still have plans to do a proxy for animating with, but that doesn't remove the need for the actual model to work.  Apparently this will be fixed and updated later this year and from the sounds of the people who are braving it in its current bug-infested state, it will be wonderful.  I'm not waiting around for it, I'll just let it catch up to me which is highly likely.

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

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!

This one's especially for @jedau on Steemit who has made numerous requests for a process video.  So here's me retopologising Za'haran/Red like I know what I'm doing, 3hrs timelapsed into ~8.5mins (bonus: learned KDEnlive).  I apologise if the flinging around in and outside the head I was doing gives anyone motion sickness.  And who knew trying to credit everything I was listening to would take all day, might never do that one again XD