Not sure what has been going on with Manjaro or whether it's just my sense of time that's been warped, but there seems to have been a longer than usual period between updates. I've been waiting for Blender 3.3 for a while as that has the new hair system in it, but Manjaro refused to update.

_{I found out at some point during these shenanigans that the new hair system was actually in 3.2 which is the version the Manjaro repo is stuck on, but wasn't appearing for me}

I finally got it to do a system update by force-refreshing the mirrors, but still don't know if that did it or if an update was coming out then anyway.

Either way it didn't matter because the app that I desperately wanted to update didn't get updated. So I caved and got the snap version working.

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.

_{the title partially comes from when 17yo was a baby and said pretty much that as I think he was trying to figure out the h sound}

I successfully crunched a lot of roleplaying notes and even got a decent start on a couple of major npcs (I only write character sheets for major npcs, everything else gets made up on the fly as I need it) and…game on Sunday didn't happen as one player was working (which we knew about) and the other one had a family thing on (which we found out when we pinged them to let them know we were going to be starting soon). I've since decided to try running that game as play by post on my Discord server, hopefully that will work out better for the people that keep consistently not making it, and also resolves scheduling issues I was having nicely (I can now run my planned weekly game on Sundays seeing as the fortnightly game is getting moved to pbp).

After last progblog I decided to break from doing the Avian model and work on the Dragonkin one for a bit. First level of panic was that the proportions were really different.

That calmed down very quickly when I remembered…I only need the wings and everything in that area was proportional enough.

_{I technically do need the tail but I could just pull that one out if the existing one wasn't in the right spot and given the different topology of both models it may end up in a slightly different spot anyway}

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.

I've made zero progress on Gundry as there is a checkbox which I think I need to tick in Particle Edit mode to make the bake show up so I can edit it, and it seems to be a guaranteed crash.  So looks like at this stage unless the new hair system drops sooner than I'm expecting it, I pretty much have to go the curve guide/soft body route.

Which means trying to figure out why my curve guides refuse to stick to their bone hooks and putting up with hair flapping around in anime locks (which at least won't be too terrible for this project because it's kind of semi-anime anyway).

And after Gundry I'm just going to be stuck in general as I don't have descriptions of the other characters, and the only other one I can do I'm not sure if I'm still doing.

For the Avian base model I'm currently trying to make a particle feather that meets my expectations.  This is the start.

Decided to try particle feathers following this tutorial on BlenderArtists. Got about this far in

and realised that I will likely need different mapping on each side because of how the particles are distributing.

I thought I was on my last attempt.  I was going to try a few more things, and then give up and make a million curve guides again and down the line nut out soft body on curves (I probably need to nut it out anyway).  

The problem I was having was that it seems that regardless of whether or not the emitter (the entire character model in this case) was set to be a collision object or not, the hair would clip straight through it when I got it to drop.

Zara does not have this problem, but she also has very short hair which I put a non-zero pin goal strength on because it sticks up a little.  This made it flop without cutting through the hair.  So I decided to try the same thing with Gundry but despite a miniscule number (0.001), I still ended up with

I feel like it's an eternal struggle getting hair settings right.

Sometimes what feels like a slight movement in your hand makes for a huge settings change. 

Poor Gundry is copping a lot of flak for his amazing hair.

I was hoping that Blender 3.1 would have better hair physics (or at least actually emitter deflect) and I would be able to let it flop and bake before attempting to style it but no such luck.