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.

The last week of May saw a bunch of random and mostly unrelated setbacks and I’ve been trying to frantically catch up ever since. This morning was icing as a dead tree fell onto the neighbour’s house. We heard the crack of the trunk breaking as it fell, thought it was thunder, and then knew something was up when we heard the impact and scurried out to investigate. Nobody was injured but their roof is going to need some repairs. Spent a big chunk of the morning helping them to clean up and joking about how none of us had had a chance to have our coffee yet.

Tha gap isn’t even that big but that’s what it feels like right now. The wing membrane is being a pain in the system. And I thought I was going so well too. I attempted combining with a previous version where I’d tried bordering with triangles and eventually got this monstrosity which I hated but less than the other ones.

Finally managed to get past the last stuck point. I’m somewhat pessimistically wondering how far away the next one is. I managed to finish the wing arm and the membrane and was concentrating really hard on making sure that the membranes (which will be distorting the most) were as squared as possible and doing the best I could with everything else (inevitably the arms turned into rectangles including around joints where I really would have preferred more squares).

And I’m tired and I’m so far beyond sick to death of constantly redoing things that I’ve already done. I’m recovering from a head cold (which set in because I chose to go to work and cover for people who were actually full on sick when I could feel it coming and is taking its sweet time buggering off because I couldn’t just rest up on the days that I had to do so) so had not much in the way of concentration and spent a lot longer staring at nothing with greater frequency than usual. Things are coming together to some value of coming together.

I would have really, really, really liked to have had this thing done and dusted and been moving on to the next bit by now but it persists in being relentlessly annoying. But I got onto a roll over the last couple of nights (which as my rolls usually do resulted in me forgetting to go to sleep) and made some headway. Most of my problem was having two direction changes very close to each other.

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.

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 I then took another deviation as apparently my base models did not have basic textures applied like I thought they had, so I did that with the ones I had already done. And while doing that I ended up transplanting a head (that would sound rather dodgy without context I think) as I’d apparently made some changes to the male model at some stage and all the fixes I’d done to the mouth on the female model really wasn’t working.

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).

I’m not sure if the rererererereretopo (I have no idea anymore) is any better than the previous one. Probably a bit hard to see the original wireframe in black under the new white wireframe. My current problem is trying to work out how to connect the arms and if there’s enough polys there. I love the Contours tool. I love all the tools. Have I mentioned how much less horrible Retopoflow makes retopology XD