The result of Sprat nagging me to draw. Red and Zip weren’t always this friendly. I kind of matched the image she finished while I was starting, and she also suggested I match with my previous Protective, so I did that too by doing a full body shot, otherwise my composition would have ended up more like which is a “slight” difference from Sprat’s composition as her characters are standing further apart and have a much less severe height difference.

Oof I haven’t done a progblog since the beginning of December and that wasn’t even a progblog, it was a noprogblog x_x So surprise surprise, the MacBook Air struggles with the kind of work I do. I had to keep toggling the particle hair on and off in Blender because adjusting things on my big rig was making that thing complain (it’s an i7 something or other with 32Gb of ram), the small rig was unusably laggy with the particles on.

Quickie because sculpt fixing is taking forever and I felt like doing something else for a little while. As I said in the last progblog, I had been intending on sketching Zara in a hive hoodie as I’ve drawn her in a steem hoodie previously, and then decided I should use her model instead. Some fixing was required and that had to be done anyway so it got done, and then I made the hoodie together out of a cube.

Please excuse the slight headache that is the abrupt camera movement towards the end (and maybe don’t watch it if you get motion sick easily _;), I only half-arsed fixed a lot of things after changing the framerate from 24 to 60. There are so many things I need to fix. Including I forgot to turn the arm socks collection back on (I could have sworn I had) but I’m not rerendering this just for that, so you can instead see why she usually wears arm socks. And just not bothering with the hair collisions after a while because this was supposed to be a thing to work out clothes rigging. If this was an actual thing I would have obsessed over it a lot longer.

There’s really not a lot of prog to blog as I’m well and truly stuck again. Very slowly doing the step by step caching physics thing to frame 0 (something keeps going wrong and making me have to start again and it’s not fun for anyone) which is exactly what I was doing last week. @rainite asked me about my characters on Discord and I said I’d done a few and would so a summary post for them, and figured I may as well chuck it in this progblog because it’s kind of prog (just over a longer period than a week) rather than making a separate summary post (which feels like cheating because I’ve posted all of these pics before, if it’s in a progblog as a progress thing it feels slightly less like cheating even though it’s basically the same thing, see it’s this kind of logic that allows people to justify idiocy).

Not a lot has changed since last week. I did some experiments with the hair, trying to get some better (or any in the case of some child hairs which I suspect from reading around don’t acknowledge physics anyway) collisions with the goggle strap. None of them were successful, so I complained to my little artbees that I would just have to wait til Blender dropped its hair update. Then @rainite (who keeps on top of these things unlike some fyns who shall remain nameless) sent a link that indicated that the physics update (which includes hair) will be along later this month so I’ll worry about it then (and hopefully will have this one out of the way and be onto the next thing by the time it drops so I can play with it in the next one) and just get it baked (I’m getting stymied by having to manually step through -120 to 0 before I can hit space and do other things while it steps itself through and hopefully doesn’t crash, but I’m now saving the cache to disk as I think it crashed last time).

With money being an annoying thing, I’ve moved all of my websites to a local server (that’s sitting on my desk, it’s tiny and adorable), which means it will probably be a bit slower for everyone (though Sprat reckons it’s not too bad and the internet isn’t the greatest on Christmas Island). I also finally got colorbox working with help from a module that extends CKEditor’s link plugin giving it some “advanced” options like the ability to add classes, so you, dear reader, will now be able to click on images to make them much moar biggerer (assuming of course I remember to actually do the extra step to make them so _;). Unfortunately it doesn’t work retroactively so it will only be posts from this one onward.

Actually the clothes bones aren’t connected to anything. I had one more go with playing with lattices and bonevelopes for the croptop rig, and then went back to the straight bonevelope rig and added a few more bones and made all the bones smaller and with smaller envelopes, as I had a lot more control over the shape and the twists of those annoying little shoulder straps with the bonevelope rig. It’s holding shape a bit better.

For once I actually had a good reason about not getting the progblog done on the Friday. 13yo and I spent the entire day making a sign for a birthday driveby. Saturday was the actual driveby and because I’m really smart and hate driving I decided I would rather hike it in 39C because that’s how much I hate driving (it was just down the road). That coupled with drifting back into habits that I’ve had since childhood that not even 12 years of strict bedtimes and wake up times and attempts that always fail despite people screaming at me that it absolutely is just a bad habit and I’m just not trying hard enough, I quite simply work much, much better at night.

Guess I better blog the prog even though I don’t feel like there’s a lot of it _; After naffing about yet again with various configurations of bones and lattices and constantly stressing about how I want the bloody end result to look (including whether or not I wanted loose hair to be combed and only wind affected or soft bodied like styled hair will have to be and “have to” is loose because I currently only know one way of styling hair in a fashion I can control), I tried cloth dynamics again with a much higher density and slightly more squarish mesh (and also fixed the mess the pants mesh was, I didn’t realise it had borked badly as I usually look at things like how the screenshots are and without the wireframe lines) and it’s kind of working now.