November ProgBlog #1: neverending story

It’s one of those time periods that has been happening more and more lately, where I’ve been feeling slightly melancholy about being another one of those failures that didn’t make it and not from lack of trying.

October ProgBlog #1: hairy frustrations

haaaaaaaaaaaaair

Now that I’ve got a hang of it, this bit is going pretty well and relatively quickly (and is also somewhat meditative at best and mind numbingly, agonisingly tedious at worst).

I feel like this is probably a bit overkill but it is mostly working. The first few times I was doing test renders I couldn’t work out why the lighting was so weird and eventually cottoned on to the hairs being too thick. Once that was fixed it looked a lot better but this other problem that I have persisted and that’s a flare I don’t fully understand happening at some point in the render.

September ProgBlog #1: learning more hair

Rigify feels a lot easier to work with. Got that going faster than I’m used to, most of the fighting in the setup was not quite understanding how to set up a spline tentacle (which I’m using for the tail), for some reason I thought the entire bone chain needed to have the property set but only the root did. It currently has five middle controllers but I may need more, will have to see how prehensile we get with what I’ve got. And also making sure all the bones were in the right spot after I had to move a few things around to fit the mesh.

August ProgBlog #1: the fun part

This was supposed to be the last July ProgBlog but comp season started (that goes for a couple of months of very intense weekends) and then I got a bad chest infection (bastard thing broke my perfect attendance record, I stormed back to work the next day though I probably shouldn’t have and it took its usual 2-3 weeks to bugger off) and then my parents came to town for a visit, so it’s now the first and possibly last August ProgBlog (because comps on days I normally project work and no other day I can sub).

July Progblog #3: passing go

I am fighting an epic battle for my life against my overwhelming desire to scrap this and try again because the topology isn’t quite right and I’m getting lumps when sculpting.

It looks and sculpts/adjusts fine with multires so it will work fine.

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.

April ProgBlog #2: Blender 2.92 notes - library overrides

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).

April ProgBlog #1: Blender 2.92 notes - slightly updated particle hair rig

Finally fought through the painful lag and got rid of all those stupid spikies.

This is the most unconvincingly tied ponytail in the history of the known universe and my brain is spazzing between not caring anymore and freaking out because it doesn’t look how I want. It’s driving me to drink.

I am seriously tossing up between investigating something like Hair Tool and just waiting longer for the new hair system to drop.

March ProgBlog #3: do you really wanna live forever

Title just because I was listening to Youth Group: Forever Young. I don’t know about forever (that’s a pretty bloody long time) but I definitely want to live long enough to get all these stories out (also a pretty bloody long time, probably longer than I’ve got, which is why I’m constantly semi-joking about cures for aging).

Today was a coding day and I started off strong (and a bit late) and then the outlaws came round to hang out (and cleaned because they can’t help themselves, not that I’m complaining XD). Got back into coding (for slightly too long) but made some good progress (for me, learning, so a lot of the stuff is mindlessly, laughably easy for people who know what they’re doing) like figuring out how vue-router works.

March ProgBlog #2: Just Don't Feel

I’ve been having a major case of don’t wanna all weekend. Part of it is from exhaustion (there was some ridiculousness to deal with which ended up with me going to bed very late and then waking up very early the following morning as I’m stubbornly continuing to try despite constantly failing to get closer to JJ’s schedule). So everything has been moving ridiculously slowly because I really don’t want to do it so I’ve been playing stupid phone games instead.