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.

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. after I remembered that despite its distinctly woodgrainy appearance I wasn’t supposed to use a Wave Texture, I was supposed to use and distort a Noise Texture, then it came back 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.

Silly Season Shenanigans set a precedent apparently, as the first progblog of the year is also late. I’ve been home for the holidays, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it 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).

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).

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.

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).

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).

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.

Currently as I type, I’m pecking at Yet More Freaking Feathers, hive, lesson planning and somewhat trying to finish my Mekton character for a game which I’m not sure when it’s going to start as I haven’t heard much of anything other than some issues with mech building since it was proposed, but I did say at the time that they could start without me (and I would jump in if/when appropriate if they started without me) as at the time I wasn’t sure if I would be able to play or not.

That’s what I’ve been doing for the past ages because I’ve been wasting a lot of time playing stupid phone games because stuff happens in the games unlike in real life where it feels no matter how much effort and hours you pour into something, absolutely nothing at all gets done. My parents happened to be up for Mother’s Day as they had come over for a quick holiday (which of course involved catching up as much as we could as we only see them a couple of times a year) so sibling dearest coerced asked me to please get some flowers and she would send a hamper of goodies.