technonaturalist

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texturing

May ProgBlog #2

I’ve made zero progress on Gundry as there is a checkbox which I think I need to tick in Particle Edit mode to make the bake show up so I can edit it, and it seems to be a guaranteed crash. So looks like at this stage unless the new hair system drops sooner than I’m expecting it, I pretty much have to go the curve guide/soft body route. Which means trying to figure out why my curve guides refuse to stick to their bone hooks and putting up with hair flapping around in anime locks (which at least won’t be too terrible for this project because it’s kind of semi-anime anyway).

May ProgBlog #1

Decided to try particle feathers following this tutorial on BlenderArtists. Got about this far in and realised that I will likely need different mapping on each side because of how the particles are distributing. Tried a cheap and dirty method I’ve used before in a hurry, and it only looked slightly better now than it did then and only because I had slightly better understanding of the settings. Once more one side is oriented the way I want but the other side isn’t.

April ProgBlog 3: The Infernal Hair Continues

I thought I was on my last attempt. I was going to try a few more things, and then give up and make a million curve guides again and down the line nut out soft body on curves (I probably need to nut it out anyway). The problem I was having was that it seems that regardless of whether or not the emitter (the entire character model in this case) was set to be a collision object or not, the hair would clip straight through it when I got it to drop.

April ProgBlog #2: INFERNAL HAIR

I feel like it’s an eternal struggle getting hair settings right. Sometimes what feels like a slight movement in your hand makes for a huge settings change. So it’s generally a good idea to hold shift (which scales everything up so adjustments are a lot more gradual). Then I have these issues of why is it like this and why are there random patches of hair. Or why it looks like it should work in particle edit mode but in object mode it looks completely different (with or without hair dynamics).

April ProgBlog #1: speaking of ridiculous things

Poor Gundry is copping a lot of flak for his amazing hair. I was hoping that Blender 3.1 would have better hair physics (or at least actually emitter deflect) and I would be able to let it flop and bake before attempting to style it but no such luck. Unfortunately Blender crashed before I could get a screenie of the pathetic wispy hair that happened in one of my render tests before I remembered to change the hair settings (had accidentally set them to the very thin settings I use for eyelashes and eyebrows), so here’s a shot of unstyled luscious locks.

March ProgBlog #4: when you forget little things

Like changing the default root and tip settings for the hair (default root is set at 1m and I can’t remember what default tip is). There is always something ridiculous in 3d. At least that’s relatively easily fixed. The hair is still on quick settings because I just wanted to see how it looked, for a shot this close I would switch to 3d curves which looks a lot better but takes a bit longer to render.

March ProgBlog 3

I’m on the third week of using Obsidian for a lot of things including organisation and I’ve worked out that the schedule I made for myself at the beginning of this year or end of last year or whenever it was does definitely work, it’s me that’s the problem (so about the usual). I also kind of want to investigate what will blow up if I add markdown to the techno editor to make copypasta easier.

March ProgBlog #2 - eternal tooling

I had a cascade of stuff happen over the last two weeks. Just stuff, nothing really major or bad but enough of that and not enough sleep that I can’t remember what most of it was. Also enough that when I was supposed to progblog last week I looked at how much progress I’d made from last week (virtually none) and went nup and bailed. First, let’s cover some prog (seeing as that’s the original purpose of these and probably what most people are interested in).

March ProgBlog #1: in which I kind of remember I have a schedule for a reason

But then sometimes something demands a lot of attention and you need to hyperfocus on that sometimes to the detriment of everything else. No, you don’t get that? It’s just me that has this problem? Drat. I continued having a lot of distraction working on all the roleplaying notes, finally getting to a stage where I felt somewhat comfortable running the last session of the “extra” group prelude despite missing notes for Vampire and Werewolf, and then that ended up falling through anyway as one of the players had an unexpected thing come up.

February ProgBlog #1: slightly less stuck

Happy I Love You Day! I spent Thursday to Sunday not being able to concentrate on any one thing for any length of time and just incrementally advanced a lot of things instead. I don’t know whether I feel somewhat accomplished at getting some work done on a lot of things or deflated because nothing feels done “enough”, but it’s a known thing that my idea of “enough” is actually unrealistic (at least in the timeframes I’ve got).