Title I should be using if I cared about SEO: one way to use Obsidian to manage creative writing projects.

Apologies in advance, I accidentally upsized some of the images in this because I forgot an important character in the mogrify command, and I am too lazy to redo those screenies.

A "short" history

Once upon a time, I used to be a total pantser.

And then I started this project.

_{in 2003 I believe}

And continued to try to pants because that's what I'd always done, until i realised that I actually needed to know everything that was going on.

Not sure what has been going on with Manjaro or whether it's just my sense of time that's been warped, but there seems to have been a longer than usual period between updates. I've been waiting for Blender 3.3 for a while as that has the new hair system in it, but Manjaro refused to update.

_{I found out at some point during these shenanigans that the new hair system was actually in 3.2 which is the version the Manjaro repo is stuck on, but wasn't appearing for me}

I finally got it to do a system update by force-refreshing the mirrors, but still don't know if that did it or if an update was coming out then anyway.

Either way it didn't matter because the app that I desperately wanted to update didn't get updated. So I caved and got the snap version working.

I did the scars as a bump map using bpainter.  Then figured out how to string normal and bump nodes so that everything would go in nicely.

Normal map texture colour out plugs in to colour in of normal map node.  Normal socket out of normal map node plugs into normal in of bump map node.

Scar image texture colour out plugs in to height in of bump map node and alpha out plugs into strength in.  Normal out of bump node goes into normal in of another bump node if chaining more on or into normal in of the principled bsdf shader.

I managed to take care of the thing I needed to take care of.  Dealt with most of the brain post-processing yesterday but it feels like there's still some subconscious resisual doing stuff so it's probably going to occupy brain space for a little while more.  But at least it's not weighing down everything.  The progblog ended up being late again mostly because of that (could not concentrate enough even when I didn't have to deal directly with the external problems) and I figured I could get an appreciable amount done on the Sunday (today) which I'd dedicated as an art day to recover.

There's been a few sucky days and it's basically not going to improve until I can get one specific task out of the way and I'm getting seriously annoyed with the blocker.

Once done I'm not dealing with it again.

On the bright side, there has been a number of great days (if busy) because my parents are up, so everything is generally going to be great once this mess is over and done with.

_{And then with some luck I'll start making appreciable progress again x_x}

I'm finally onto the feet of the reeeeeeeeeeeeeetopo.

The problem with hands, is that I keep ending up with a Moebius strip despite my best efforts.

(this is not technically a Moebius strip, it's just the same feeling I get when you're tracing one; for the Home Edders, Moebius strips are a fun activity, get the kids to cut out a strip of paper, half-twist one end, tape the ends together and tell them to draw a line on either the inside or the outside but not both)

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.

So I actually had some unexpected extra time yesterday and thought I would get a whole pile of work done before the time I should be doing the progblog and...got stuck into Duolingo because of course I did.

_{I've been doing the bare minimum just to keep my streak going for the last few days and thought I should try to get through all the languages this time and I'm doing six languages because I'm dumb, the Memrise streaks meanwhile are long gone because I have to do those ones individually which obviously would take up more time x_x}

End result, didn't get nearly as much done as I wanted to before starting the progblog which I started late and had to postpone posting til today because I kind of passed out last night.  Sigh.

I'm sure you're all just as sick of seeing the back of Red's head as I am.

Still trying to get used to the schedule I set for myself.  I'd love to say I'm getting there but I'm really not, quite the opposite in fact.  I still want to kill problems and I still want to just finish whatever I'm working on at the time (which is always stuff that is going to take a long time because it's the nature of the beast, and less common but still more common than I like, because I've completely misjudged how long something will take) or also infrequent but still too frequent, something goes wrong somewhere like a computer crash or Blender acting up and I'll lose a pile of work that I then just want to get back to where I was before I stop.

Today was a js day (scheduled days are Monday and Friday apparently) and exactly nothing exciting happened, there was just a lot of me trying and failing to figure out how to save a resorted order (I have some ideas, and am also trying to get J to help).