I rarely get as much done as I want each session but I was unexpectedly a LOT busier than usual. This was meant to be posted yesterday but shenanigans happened This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

As I’ve mostly been working on characters and outfits recently (or more specifically one character and one outfit) there hasn’t been a lot of room for the usual extremely dodgy looking and usually very random views that can come up when modelling humans. Or so I thought. I forgot to “apply base” on the multires sculpt before I started making the shirt so I actually made the shirt on top of the default proportions instead of the character’s proportions (a lot bigger) and inadvertently turned her into an adult movie actor.

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 am fighting an epic battle for my life against my overwhelming desire to scrap this and try again because the topology isn’t quite right and I’m getting lumps when sculpting. I did actually have a very quick go at redoing it earlier with edge modelling rather than extrusion and ended up with a similar-but-different thing with a different problem that I couldn’t resolve so I came back to this one because while the topology of the other one was better this one was quicker and I couldn’t figure out how to resolve the problem that cropped up with the other one It looks and sculpts/adjusts fine with multires so it will work fine.

I finally finished the Dragonkin models (there was some jiggery pokery with the uv maps after I’d finished the claws) and restarted Red. It was supposed to be a simple case of append the male Dragonkin model, append all the materials I’d already done, do the horns, do the multires sculpt. It was not a simple case. I redid the shaders, backported some of the modifications made (knocking out some extraneous colour nodes and adding in some forgotten bump nodes, good thing I can run multiple Blenders) and then started working on the horns.

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.