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Jul
25
2022

July ProgBlog #3: haaaaaaaaaair

the title partially comes from when 17yo was a baby and said pretty much that as I think he was trying to figure out the h sound

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).

Jul
04
2022

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.

Dragonkin alignment

I technically do need the tail but I could just pull that one out if the existing one wasn't in the right spot and given the different topology of both models it may end up in a slightly different spot anyway

May
09
2022

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).

And after Gundry I'm just going to be stuck in general as I don't have descriptions of the other characters, and the only other one I can do I'm not sure if I'm still doing.

For the Avian base model I'm currently trying to make a particle feather that meets my expectations.  This is the start.

May
02
2022

May ProgBlog #1

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

playing with particle instances in Blender 3.1.2   playing with particle instancing in Blender 3.1.2

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

Apr
25
2022

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.

Zara does not have this problem, but she also has very short hair which I put a non-zero pin goal strength on because it sticks up a little.  This made it flop without cutting through the hair.  So I decided to try the same thing with Gundry but despite a miniscule number (0.001), I still ended up with

Apr
18
2022

April ProgBlog #2: INFERNAL HAIR

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

luscious unstyled particle hair locks

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

Blender 3.1 hair settings gone wild

Apr
11
2022

April ProgBlog #1: speaking of ridiculous things

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

Gundry scraggly hair Blender 3.1

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.

deflect emitter still doesn't work

Mar
28
2022

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).

incorrect hair settings

There is always something ridiculous in 3d.

At least that's relatively easily fixed.

eyebrows and eyelashes with better hair settings

Mar
22
2022

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).

I didn't end up doing much on UASG because I was too busy writing roleplaying notes. Sunday was a lot more productive. Gundry got the default Ocean eyes from the CW Eye add-on

Mar
14
2022

March ProgBlog #2 - eternal tooling

I had a cascade of stuff happen over the last two weeks.

Just stuff, nothing really major or bad but enough of that and not enough sleep that I can't remember what most of it was.

Also enough that when I was supposed to progblog last week I looked at how much progress I'd made from last week (virtually none) and went nup and bailed.

First, let's cover some prog (seeing as that's the original purpose of these and probably what most people are interested in).

Prog

I have two more toes to go on Gundry.

sculpting foot in Blender 3