Same freakinng problem. I stayed up way too late and then didn’t end up posting on Muddling Monday because I hyperfocused on trying to kerbstomp it into the ground. The kerbstomping part didn’t happen but I did at least figure out something that worked (at least for now, I don’t know if it will still work later). Anyway I have managed to work out that there’s some problem between Deform and Interpolate. With no modifiers on in viewport, everything is fine and dandy.

There is the usual reason for no progblog since the first one of the year, and that was I got stuck. I needed to comb the hair on the highest multires level (because the render looked completely different to the viewport, which I thought was something to do with hair settings and didn’t realise the levels would make that substantial a difference) and I’m not sure if multires and curve hairs play well together as combing was really quick and easy at level 0 but at level 3 it’s jittery and unpredictable and often moves in at least the opposite if not some random direction (it’s not laggy at all, just unpredictable and makes an already tedious process extremely unnecessarily aggravating). I got really mad and deleted the hair node group modifier thingies I’d put on it earlier and shoved the Surface Deform node back to the top which has helped a bit, as in it’s not jittering randomly or pretending there’s some kind of force field active and it doesn’t keep flying off in random directions instead of going in the direction I’m pushing it.

Transcripts for my messy handwriting if it’s too small/too messy/all of the above: Top left: Super fast sketchy! 2 brushes rough pen (can also use fineliner) wet brushes 2 layers ~15-30min When I really want to colour the sketchy but don’t want to spend a lot of time, wet brush blends nice and quick Top right: Sketchy 2 brushes rough pen (can also use gpen or fineliner and can do nice lines) 4b pencil 2 layers 1-2hrs maybe Workable tradeoff with nice and fast

And the forever unchanging habit of failing weekly progblogs because I feel bad about not progging enough. at least this is one of the few times I have the somewhat reasonable excuse of it was silly season and January will still be my planning month because that’s been working out well so far I have been doing the hair strands in pairs which is one of the reasons why it’s been taking the better part of forever. Doing it in larger groups/rows has previously always ended badly for me. Recently I spat it and decided it’s been a while, let’s just see how we go.

I was so happy when I made the female Dragonkin model as I thought I was finally done. I went to make a new file to start (re)making Red when I suddenly realised…forgot the retractable claws. Ergh. And then I realised I’d put the tail too high up the back and that the base was too thin. More ergh. I spent a few good hours sulking. Then got back into it. On the bright side there’s always dodgy looking things that crop up when modelling.

Remembering things is quicker than learning things from scratch, but I still hate uv mapping. I’m also so very tired and so very glad that I made a very early decision to never pitch this thing given the amount of hate 3d gets. If I’d been doing it for anyone other than myself I would have probably given up long ago.

Another late start today as I had a bit of laundry to do (though I did get eldest to get it off the line for me in the evening as I found outside too cold) and also spent a bit too much time catching random episodes of Demon Slayer (article contains spoilers) with 17yo who was recovering from a head cold. But at least the hands are done. Connecting the wings to the body was a bit tricky but got there eventually and didn’t take as long as I thought it would. What took longer (and pushed me past bedtime again) was deciding I needed to do the wing membrane texture RIGHT NOW because I don’t even know why anymore.

Closing meshes is on the long list of things I hate. Okay I don’t actually feel strongly enough to hate it, but it is annoying when things don’t just close nicely. The last membrane and finger went pretty quickly and smoothly, which somewhat made up for the super late start caused by house discussions. At least I was able to get some work done, we had been going to turn the power out so that some cabling could safely go into the roof.

Part 1 happened over the course of weeks or months a couple of decades ago when I migrated to Drupal from livejournal (I didn’t really note how long it took partly because I wasn’t interested at the time and mostly because I was trying to get through that cringey era as quickly as possible). though it has been interesting watching my tone change from when I was blogging every little thing and basically talking to my friends on livejournal, to still kind of doing that but realising that people I didn’t know were also reading my blog at some point shortly after migrating to Drupal, to kind of just talking to a void/audience that may or may not be there, to mostly talking to myself and occasionally addressing the potential audience or specific people Part 2 started a few months ago after I finally (after way too long because I am nothing if not unreasonably stubborn) accepted the fact that I’ve been really, really struggling to keep on top of Drupal updates alongside everything else. By stupid dumb luck I saw hugo mentioned in an article on one of my feeds (the author was migrating their site from Drupal 6 to hugo from memory) and went and had a look.

The last week of May saw a bunch of random and mostly unrelated setbacks and I’ve been trying to frantically catch up ever since. This morning was icing as a dead tree fell onto the neighbour’s house. We heard the crack of the trunk breaking as it fell, thought it was thunder, and then knew something was up when we heard the impact and scurried out to investigate. Nobody was injured but their roof is going to need some repairs. Spent a big chunk of the morning helping them to clean up and joking about how none of us had had a chance to have our coffee yet.