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.

My camera work (the camera was my phone) was shaky and awful and the position I was in was the best I could do at the time but definitely was not the best.  But to get better I'd need a multiple camera setup in some interesting locations and I don't have multiple cameras.  The sound in the recording was also muddy so I had to overlay some tracks.

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.

At least the reworks are getting faster? I might even finish this character this year, imagine that.

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.

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}

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.

I think/hope I'm getting closer with the particle feather instancing.  Using two feathers (it's still technically one feather, the second one is a linked duplicate) and two vertex groups I've managed to get them to align the way I want, but of course now there's the problem of the shape is not quite right so I have to figure out how to get them to layer correctly.

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).

And after Gundry I'm just going to be stuck in general as I don't have descriptions of the other characters, and the only other one I can do I'm not sure if I'm still doing.

For the Avian base model I'm currently trying to make a particle feather that meets my expectations.  This is the start.

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.

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.

Zara does not have this problem, but she also has very short hair which I put a non-zero pin goal strength on because it sticks up a little.  This made it flop without cutting through the hair.  So I decided to try the same thing with Gundry but despite a miniscule number (0.001), I still ended up with

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. 

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.