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.

And after spending way too much time and effort on this malarky and really struggling with polydown, I revisited the idea of particle down.  The last time I tried this it didn't work out great.

That feeling when you're the only one that knows that you did stuff because it doesn't look like much changed at all.

That was a big part of why I decided to just let the streak break than try and push a late progblog.  The other reason was that all the other stuff was a huge fight (some of it physically fights, or at least shouting matches, but mostly just the usual struggle trying to keep on top of things).

_{Stupidly I missed a whole row in that screenshot, this is what happens when your naming system is descriptive enough but you forgot what you were doing.}

I think the layering is somewhat working out better, and I managed to resolve some issues I was having on the hands.

I am going to do the down in two systems and I am most likely going to regret it.  The big downy feathers (which aren't called that but I can't remember what they're called) were finished not long ago, they are topside and underside but they look pretty much the same.

The render actually isn't terrible at a distance.

Different story up close x_x I need to fiddle with the strand thickness and number.

The  completionist in me is somewhat annoyed that I didn't get the September Powerbee.  I must have done it too early in the morning or something stupid like that (I did it around the same time as I usually do but my "around" tends to be an hour or so).

Oh well.

My parents have been over and seem to have decided to do a lot of tours this time round (probably because an uncle and his family are also over), and invited us out on a number of them.  It's been great because it's stuff we either haven't done for a few years or may not have had an opportunity to do so, and hopefully we've crammed enough stuff in to make up for the last couple of months.

I think I've finished the first light and shadow layers for the Eladrin. 

It went pretty quick, I don't know how long it actually took as while Toolsday is the day for it, there was a bit going on.

I was talking to Sprat about having difficulty with feathers (because I'm trying to do Zara's head feathers better) and that I didn't have a feather generator. Then it occurred to me to see if one existed and apparently one does.

This week has been thoroughly boring as far as progress goes.  Even the progress I made on roleplaying notes felt pretty meh.

The uv maps were so horribly borked that  I decided I was just going to bite it and redo the sculpt (which is a comparatively easy thing to do).

While I was there I noted that some fixes which I thought I'd done with the base model hadn't actually been done, so decided I would actually do all the fixes on the base model that I was supposed to do, including applying basic textures, which is another thing I thought I'd already done.

Gundry still has not budged.  I was supposed to do more work on him today but I ended up doing other things instead.  I also need to have a chat with my young friend and find out if we're still going along with...well I hesitate to call what we were working off any kind of plan, not even a loose and fluid one if this project is still going to go.

I think/hope I'm getting closer with the particle feather instancing.  Using two feathers (it's still technically one feather, the second one is a linked duplicate) and two vertex groups I've managed to get them to align the way I want, but of course now there's the problem of the shape is not quite right so I have to figure out how to get them to layer correctly.

In that gap was a slightly unexpected new puppy (which I wrote a bit about in the homeschool miscellany) and covid (not worth the ridiculously excessive fuss and the frantic stripping of as much freedom as possible in that space of time that was made of it, wouldn't recommend the headache though). And then there was me figuring it wasn't worth the blog because there hadn't been much prog and trying to manage that and consistently failing as other things kept happening (not least of which comp season started).

After a lot of stuffing around, I eventually worked out there was something either wrong with the file or with the particle system that was making my curve guides not work.  A bit more experimentation later I found that recreating the particle system worked, and that NURBs paths no longer seemed to work but Beziers did.