I would have really, really, really liked to have had this thing done and dusted and been moving on to the next bit by now but it persists in being relentlessly annoying.

But I got onto a roll over the last couple of nights (which as my rolls usually do resulted in me forgetting to go to sleep) and made some headway.

Most of my problem was having two direction changes very close to each other.

I deliberately didn't post a progblog last week as I was having a minor tanty about how nothing had changed.  Nothing much has changed still, I continue fighting to square up the mesh but it's working out better with more mesh for more context.

Last week was "interesting".

I found out (from deviantART via another friend of hers who found out from a mutual friend of theirs on Facebook, which is how I'd suspected for a long time I would find something like this out) that an online friend that I have been talking to almost daily for the last couple of decades had died apparently on Christmas Eve. We had been chatting the week or so before, and she had told me at some point not long before then that she suspected she was cancer-riddled and that her organs were starting to fail and she probably didn't have long left (she suspected cancer quite a while before then but was so terrified of hospitals she chose to just die from it rather than seek treatment, and the myriad of health issues she'd had throughout her entire life probably played a part in that decision too). I don't know what the actual cause of death was.

That took some processing.

We apparently have to use lesson plan templates this year which has increased my admin time a little bit (I now have to translate it into the template to send to my boss instead of just exporting a pdf like I was before).  This would have been fine if LibreOffice hadn't decided that it wasn't going to play nice with the template and I had to rebuild the damn thing so I could use it which took a bit of doing.

Then doing the sorting and processing I've been doing in digikam I had a big rethink about how I manage photos and collections and decided to split out some photos that were either sent to me by family while they were on vacation or photos that were taken of events (J took a few of footy games when we had season passes and I have taken a few of lion dances) into their own collections.

QAD render to celebrate finishing the bulk of rigging. A couple of tiny little tweaks to make but it's stuff I can do as I go.

Low enhanced antialiasing, radiosity and Skytracer on default settings (added the thing, checked the cloud boxes).

Think I used too much blue. And yes it looks funny as there are no joint or face morphs. I need more RAM and less OpenGL sliders.

The pose is based off a really old pic of my sister's as I realised a bit ago that my base models matched up with her fan characters.

I've spent a good amount of time trying to work out how the hell to do a prehensile tail rig. The last time I did it, it involved a 72 bone multi-goal IK chain.

It kinda hurt.

This time, it involves a 65 bone IKB chain, main direction controlled by the big ball-shaped null object on the end.

I haven't yet tried to wrap the tail around something but I am stupidly confident.

Going to do some sliders to control the fingers and the wings, then that's ready to go, and I have to do the sliders thing for the fingers on the other two models before I start building characters.

But I can start building characters! YAY!

Zul'jinn, High Prince of the Flyers.  Paint over of a photo I took of my husband.