July Progblog #2: at least this repeat work is mostly fun

I finally finished the Dragonkin models (there was some jiggery pokery with the uv maps after I’d finished the claws) and restarted Red.

It was supposed to be a simple case of append the male Dragonkin model, append all the materials I’d already done, do the horns, do the multires sculpt.

It was not a simple case.

I redid the shaders, backported some of the modifications made (knocking out some extraneous colour nodes and adding in some forgotten bump nodes, good thing I can run multiple Blenders) and then started working on the horns.

June ProgBlog #5: almost there

Remembering things is quicker than learning things from scratch, but I still hate uv mapping.

I’m also so very tired and so very glad that I made a very early decision to never pitch this thing given the amount of hate 3d gets. If I’d been doing it for anyone other than myself I would have probably given up long ago.

June Progblog #4: finishing things is weird

Another late start today as I had a bit of laundry to do (though I did get eldest to get it off the line for me in the evening as I found outside too cold) and also spent a bit too much time catching random episodes of Demon Slayer (article contains spoilers) with 17yo who was recovering from a head cold.

But at least the hands are done.

Connecting the wings to the body was a bit tricky but got there eventually and didn’t take as long as I thought it would. What took longer (and pushed me past bedtime again) was deciding I needed to do the wing membrane texture RIGHT NOW because I don’t even know why anymore.

December ProgBlog 1: here we go again

I don’t think I’ve ever had a last month of the year run according to any semblance of a plan and that may or may not have something to do with my persistent delusion that I can somehow continue doing the same thing plus all the extra time consuming things in the same amount of time.

Pro-tip: it never works.

The end of year display was great, and I had the “brilliant” idea to film the whole thing (I did get permission from the head coach to do it first) and edit them all together.

August ProgBlog #2: because I need more projects

I really should stop trying to push to finish things before going to bed because the times that it has worked is probably still in the single digits.

I decided to postpone the progblog because I’ve been so out of it I really hadn’t gotten a lot of work done, partly because I just didn’t look at my schedule and partly because I managed to simultaneously not know what day it was and know what day it was because of who had to be where by when. All I had to show was stuff that has been seen before quite recently.

August ProgBlog #1: the plod of eternal slow

This week has been thoroughly boring as far as progress goes. Even the progress I made on roleplaying notes felt pretty meh.

The uv maps were so horribly borked that I decided I was just going to bite it and redo the sculpt (which is a comparatively easy thing to do).

While I was there I noted that some fixes which I thought I’d done with the base model hadn’t actually been done, so decided I would actually do all the fixes on the base model that I was supposed to do, including applying basic textures, which is another thing I thought I’d already done.

July ProgBlog #3: haaaaaaaaaair

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).

July ProgBlog #2

There was drama with my uv maps. They decided to “helpfully” maximise my uv space by stacking (basically symmetrical things neatly align themselves on top of one another to maximise efficient use of uv space…however because I’m painting the uv maps and there’s different things on each side I absolutely do not under any circumstances want that) and I don’t know when that happened or how to fix it.

And there were these random little black dots which I think are polygons (because they only show up in polygon selection mode) but are unselectable. I don’t even know if they’re actually polygons or glitches in the matrix as they seem to randomly appear and disappear.

July ProgBlog #1

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 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.

June ProgBlog #2: because you know...instances

Gundry still has not budged. I was supposed to do more work on him today but I ended up doing other things instead. I also need to have a chat with my young friend and find out if we’re still going along with…well I hesitate to call what we were working off any kind of plan, not even a loose and fluid one if this project is still going to go.