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Apr
16
2021

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).

Currently my plan (to some value of "plan" is:

idea for how to set up asset library thing for Blender 2.92

Apr
04
2021

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.

Blender 2.92 particle hair unconvincing ponytail

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.

Not really, I just happened to have Midori and lemonade on my desk at the time.

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

Then I forgot how to rig hair -_-

Mar
26
2021

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.

Mar
21
2021

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.

I really, really hope the new hair system in Blender is a metric boatload better (and faster) than what I'm doing now.

this is exasperating

Mar
06
2021

March ProgBlog #1: some things go faster than others

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.

Feb
27
2021

February ProgBlog #4: I see colours!

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).

Feb
13
2021

February ProgBlog #2: circliar

The title is a cute mispronunciation youngest used to say for that word group when he was a toddler (circliar, triangliar, particliar...).

Circular is closer to where I'm getting. 

Screenshot 20210212 225304

I'm really glad about this as for a moment I thought that I wasn't going to be able to fit everything into a circle.

Even if the middle bit (the rectangle where the crosshair looking 3d cursor is) is 40min long x_x

It is kind of 2-4 houses smooshed together.

And those Fliers take up ridiculous amounts of room.  As I keep saying.  Because even I can't believe just how much space they take up.

Jan
23
2021

Protective 3

Red and Zip anticipating trouble

The result of Sprat nagging me to draw.  Red and Zip weren't always this friendly.

I kind of matched the image she finished while I was starting, and she also suggested I match with my previous Protective, so I did that too by doing a full body shot, otherwise my composition would have ended up more like

Red and Zip closer up

which is a "slight" difference from Sprat's composition as her characters are standing further apart and have a much less severe height difference.

Jan
16
2021

January ProgBlog #1: super-LATE-ive somewhat new

Oof I haven't done a progblog since the beginning of December and that wasn't even a progblog, it was a noprogblog x_x

So surprise surprise, the MacBook Air struggles with the kind of work I do.  I had to keep toggling the particle hair on and off in Blender because adjusting things on my big rig was making that thing complain (it's an i7 something or other with 32Gb of ram), the small rig was unusably laggy with the particles on.

I'd like to say I must have been whining about it more than I thought as Sprat nagged me to draw instead, but she is usually nagging me to draw instead. 

So I drew and this is what I'm working on at the moment.

Nov
06
2020

November ProgBlog #2: splitting hairs

October ProgBlog 3 is technically November ProgBlog 1 and just isn't called as such because I was a seriously sleep deprived idiot at the time.

Where I left off, I'd started on the hairs by doing the reasonably easy eyelashes and eyebrows first.  Okay eyebrows are pretty easy, just make a density map and then comb.  Eyelashes I always have to keep painting hairs on carefully and then combing equally carefully.

And then had to tone things down a little so that they didn't look like oil painting strokes.

Only vaguely related, I have read about someone using hair particles as oil painting strokes previously but they were asking questions about it and I didn't see the outcome.

Then there was a system update which let me use my gpu for rendering again, yay!

And then I actually tested hybrid mode and it was about 20 seconds quicker on my test render.