Finally managed to get past the last stuck point. I’m somewhat pessimistically wondering how far away the next one is. I managed to finish the wing arm and the membrane and was concentrating really hard on making sure that the membranes (which will be distorting the most) were as squared as possible and doing the best I could with everything else (inevitably the arms turned into rectangles including around joints where I really would have preferred more squares).

And I’m tired and I’m so far beyond sick to death of constantly redoing things that I’ve already done. I’m recovering from a head cold (which set in because I chose to go to work and cover for people who were actually full on sick when I could feel it coming and is taking its sweet time buggering off because I couldn’t just rest up on the days that I had to do so) so had not much in the way of concentration and spent a lot longer staring at nothing with greater frequency than usual. Things are coming together to some value of coming together.

During my manual migration I have been cringing at all my old artwork and rediscovering a few gems such as part of a conversation I had with one of my friends about 3d back in 2013. They said: Lol shame there is not one 3d app to rule them all that does ALL the things and is moddable to suit the individual’s work flow I replied i would like One App that had a workflow and was split like Lightwave (though there’s thought of unifying Lightwave, i was really pissed about it when i first heard about it, then more recently now that i’m better at this stuff i realised i don’t care if they unify it as long as the workflow doesn’t change too much and i can still box model) with a scupt mode as awesome as Sculptris that also integrated animatable sculpting/morphs like ChronoSculpt and had cool retopo tools like ZRemesher from ZBrush or BSurfaces from Blender and a dynamic paint mode like Blender or Sculptris but probably easy like Sculptris but that can update UVs on the fly and a rigging toolset that’s easy as either Genoma in Lightwave or whatever Blender has (haven’t tried but apparently good) and definitely less crashy than Genoma deep breath in

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. To some value of better. My DE of choice got upgraded to KDE6 which is mostly great for the most part. I had to swap out my theme switcher (Yin Yang) because it didn’t want to work under Wayland. Minor issue I’m having is that its replacement (Koi) doesn’t always automatically switch (it mostly does but not always and I don’t know why) and doesn’t switch the Konsole colours.

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.

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.

Lame excuse: I haven’t done a progblog forever because I got well and truly stuck redoing the prehensile tail rig, but I think I’ve fixed it now, and made it work (to some value of work) with the pitchipoy rig (the spline and its controllers are actually on their own rig, but the spline controllers are copying the location of some controllers that are on the pitchipoy rig with additional thingies to keep them from moving too far from each other, feels a bit convoluted but it works).

The Dragonkin build was relatively easier than the Avian one; the wing fingers were a little bit fiddly but there were only five of them as opposed to a million feathers and all one object as opposed to a million XD The tail rig was an almighty pain. Firstly, the pitchipoy script couldn’t seem to recognise the bones if I did the tail the easy way (one big bone subdivided down into a million little ones). Or if they were extruded one from another. Long winded duplicate, move along Y a bit and then connect worked (but took ages). Then I tried using bone hooks which I’ve done before but I kept stuffing something or other up and the spline would end up either moving or stretching a long way and I couldn’t seem to find the right combination of settings to make it stop sucking. Then I found this other method that uses bone envelopes which did the job I was trying to do and was a lot easier to set up (one armature modifier vs a million hook modifiers). Except that I’d made the tail too short so I made it longer. Then realised I need the end of the tail to remain stiff as in the time period I’m writing in pretty much all the Dragonkin have weaponised tails (I don’t think they all did in their early generations, but I’ll deal with that if I ever have to make a Dragonkin with a plain tail). Apparently pitchipoy didn’t like me modifying the bone chain so I had to do it again. Ergh.

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.