February ProgBlog #3: the week everything kept falling and then picked up

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.

February ProgBlog #2: the day everything imploded

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.

February ProgBlog #1: that feeling when

you could have done so much more if everything had actually gone according to plan.

I’m resigned to using my tablet as a tablet partly because I didn’t want to pack it away again and redownload the Wacom drivers and reset my desk setup for the Wacom and mostly because I just want to use the shiny new thing. The most it’s done is the occasional mapping whenever I get obsessed over around to it.

January ProgBlog #2

In contrast to characters, furniture is relatively quick and easy to do. Though I did have a massive brainfart moment and temporarily forgot how I’d done woodgrainesque textures as it’s been a while.

Sprat and I joked about warning kids with tails to not mess around on the chairs (the usual thing of don’t swing on them etc) and then them falling over and getting their tails kinked and getting stuck in the chairs after falling and having unsympathetic caregivers yelling TOLD YOU.

January ProgBlog #1: (not) working (much) with (a lot of) distractions

Silly Season Shenanigans set a precedent apparently, as the first progblog of the year is also late.

After finishing silly season shenanigans and homeschool miscellany (the two things that had a time limit) I was finally able to get back onto the Avian base model. For a change everything progressed relatively quickly despite the poor little MacBook Air struggling (it was enough to convince me to aim for the Framework 16 instead of the 13, the idea of the graphics module won me over despite the 13 being my vastly preferred form factor).

November ProgBlog #1: I choose this

Because while it’s still not amazing it’s at least somewhat passable and it’s working out a lot better than the polydown (much easier to layer for starters).

I really, really, really should be doing separate systems for the body and the wings but I’ll fix it later (as there will probably be something better to fix/redo it with later) but meanwhile fortuitously the edge transitions to skin will actually look fine as the child hairs from the top looks conveniently like fluffy down (sadly it didn’t work upside down both ways I tried it but this is fine).

October ProgBlog #2: sunk cost fallacy

Stuff went super slowly again as states happened (everything went well) and I dithered around trying to fix the feather patterning (including readjusting a lot of the feathers that got displaced and put everything else out of whack when I fixed the underlying mesh, I really should know better by now that while other people can get away with not doing things I never can) and flatten things out a little bit.

October ProgBlog #1: muddling not-Monday

Screenshot of a render because I was too lazy to save out the actual render. Did it as a test partly because Blender is apparently slightly less likely to crash if I do renders as opposed to the viewport preview and mostly because it’s been a while since I did one and I have to do one every so often to make sure things looks how they’re supposed to look (the viewport render is pretty accurate but is also deliberately lower quality than even my preview renders).

September ProgBlog #1: everything sucks

August sucked almost but not totally completely.

I think I did peck a bit here and there but didn’t really have time to sit down and actually work on anything, and even then not enough got done that I felt was worth the effort of writing about.

And then I nearly missed September too for many and varied reasons.

At one point I cracked it with the top of the wing being too pointy and went through and did the point by point modifications I’d been studiously avoiding and desperately hoping I could juust cover over with the feathers, because it didn’t enter my stupid head that the feathers kind of needed to follow the underlying form. Most of that comprised of just making most of the quads more planar (grey, some of them had to stay coloured/non-planar as it’s a reasonably low poly model and making the quads grey would cause the form to be lost).

June ProgBlog #2: thought track

A new problem arose. I have this song in my thought track:

and I found out from comments on that video that there is a version with vocals.

And it has beautiful lyrics.