I accidentally spent the entire week on UASG (or to be extremely specific, on those freaking dreadlocks >_<).

I'm currently on my...6th or 7th iteration.

I thought I'd be a smartarse and lay out the curve guides first (which I think I mentioned last progblog), and then followed up with experiments on whether I use the particle hair controls or the similar looking controls on the curve guides themselves to do the dreadlocks.

The curve guide controls couldn't get values as high as the actual particle hair settings so I used those instead.

The slow and painful days are starting to become a habit I really need to snap out of.  Both projects are plodding along and I'm kind of bumbling my way through everything else around them with varying degrees of success.

AER

After switching back to the colour map, I attacked the shape of the dragon tattoo, adding in these little belly scale segmentation things.

Trust me it's one of those tiny little things that you don't notice when it's done but that you would definitely notice if it hadn't been done x_x

Finally fought through the painful lag and got rid of all those stupid spikies.

This is the most unconvincingly tied ponytail in the history of the known universe and my brain is spazzing between not caring anymore and freaking out because it doesn't look how I want. It's driving me to drink.

_{Not really, I just happened to have Midori and lemonade on my desk at the time.}

I am seriously tossing up between investigating something like Hair Tool and just waiting longer for the new hair system to drop.

Then I forgot how to rig hair -_-

Title just because I was listening to Youth Group: Forever Young.  I don't know about forever (that's a pretty bloody long time) but I definitely want to live long enough to get all these stories out (also a pretty bloody long time, probably longer than I've got, which is why I'm constantly semi-joking about cures for aging).

Today was a coding day and I started off strong (and a bit late) and then the outlaws came round to hang out (and cleaned because they can't help themselves, not that I'm complaining XD).  Got back into coding (for slightly too long) but made some good progress (for me, learning, so a lot of the stuff is mindlessly, laughably easy for people who know what they're doing) like figuring out how vue-router works.

I've been having a major case of don't wanna all weekend.  Part of it is from exhaustion (there was some ridiculousness to deal with which ended up with me going to bed very late and then waking up very early the following morning as I'm stubbornly continuing to try despite constantly failing to get closer to JJ's schedule).  So everything has been moving ridiculously slowly because I really don't want to do it so I've been playing stupid phone games instead.

I really, really hope the new hair system in Blender is a metric boatload better (and faster) than what I'm doing now.

So I actually had some unexpected extra time yesterday and thought I would get a whole pile of work done before the time I should be doing the progblog and...got stuck into Duolingo because of course I did.

_{I've been doing the bare minimum just to keep my streak going for the last few days and thought I should try to get through all the languages this time and I'm doing six languages because I'm dumb, the Memrise streaks meanwhile are long gone because I have to do those ones individually which obviously would take up more time x_x}

End result, didn't get nearly as much done as I wanted to before starting the progblog which I started late and had to postpone posting til today because I kind of passed out last night.  Sigh.

I'm sure you're all just as sick of seeing the back of Red's head as I am.

Still trying to get used to the schedule I set for myself.  I'd love to say I'm getting there but I'm really not, quite the opposite in fact.  I still want to kill problems and I still want to just finish whatever I'm working on at the time (which is always stuff that is going to take a long time because it's the nature of the beast, and less common but still more common than I like, because I've completely misjudged how long something will take) or also infrequent but still too frequent, something goes wrong somewhere like a computer crash or Blender acting up and I'll lose a pile of work that I then just want to get back to where I was before I stop.

Today was a js day (scheduled days are Monday and Friday apparently) and exactly nothing exciting happened, there was just a lot of me trying and failing to figure out how to save a resorted order (I have some ideas, and am also trying to get J to help).

There's a bit going on again and it seems like youngest and I have crashed back hard into undesirable old habits (he's basically refusing to go to bed and staying up as late as possible and needing to incessantly natter at me while I'm trying to work, and I'm just staying up late because I work best at night and can get quite a lot done in a short space of time unlike during the day where I distract at the slightest movement of air especially when it's on things I hate (like javascript).

Javascript

Stuff is a mess right now.  Don't really want to talk about it as it involves other people (spoiler alert: nobody is dead yet and J and I are still together seeing as those are the things people seem to be jumping to).  End result of that is my head went into interesting places that are hard to come back from and while I really tried hard to do some art to stabilise, well basically it didn't work out, so buggerall got done.

Literally buggerall of anything got done.  No art (hence the name of this post), no moderation work for OCA, barely any housework, definitely not the photobooks which I wanted to start on last month because I'm not sure about postage times due to some pointless virus, not much of anything.

October ProgBlog 3 is technically November ProgBlog 1 and just isn't called as such because I was a seriously sleep deprived idiot at the time.

Where I left off, I'd started on the hairs by doing the reasonably easy eyelashes and eyebrows first.  Okay eyebrows are pretty easy, just make a density map and then comb.  Eyelashes I always have to keep painting hairs on carefully and then combing equally carefully.

And then had to tone things down a little so that they didn't look like oil painting strokes.

_{Only vaguely related, I have read about someone using hair particles as oil painting strokes previously but they were asking questions about it and I didn't see the outcome.}

Then there was a system update which let me use my gpu for rendering again, yay!

And then I actually tested hybrid mode and it was about 20 seconds quicker on my test render.