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

There is a snap 3 day lockdown which my parents have arrived just in time for, and my newfound problems with the snapping tool in Blender. I’m mildly annoyed about it because I won’t be able to train or go see my parents over the weekend. I’ve gotten onto retopologising Zara. I know I said I wanted to animate first but I realised when I was rigging Red that I’d stuffed up some bits in the rig so needed to rerig Zara anyway and figured I may as well retopo and rebake seeing as I have to rerig.

I spent what I could of the week and the weekend just gone (including staying up way too late which I want to get out of the habit of but I’m really feeling an insane amount of time pressure at the moment) trying to figure out how I was going to set up linked library overrides through files to have the characters set up how I want. Because of course it wasn’t straight up just linking things in and having them work, that would be too easy (and also some incredible magic under the hood but you know I had to try).

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.