technonaturalist

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za'haran

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.

retopologising Red's horns in Blender 4.2
I did actually have a very quick go at redoing it earlier with edge modelling rather than extrusion and ended up with a similar-but-different thing with a different problem that I couldn’t resolve so I came back to this one because while the topology of the other one was better this one was quicker and I couldn’t figure out how to resolve the problem that cropped up with the other one

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.