I needed a break from technical stuff, so I started sculpting Zara. I don’t know why I always start with eyebrows, I just do, so I did the eyebrows, but then deviated from my usual of going down the nose and doing the face and bounced over to doing the ears. Probably because hers are a bit pointy. The point is tricky as the Avians have an obvious point but their ears aren’t nearly as big as the Dragonkin ears. She doesn’t look like anyone yet but we’ll get there, hopefully in less time than it took to do Red as she’s got the standard amount of limbs and I don’t completely suck at retopo and uv unwrapping anymore (even though I still don’t like either of them XD).

Today was the last day of regionals at our gym, there were three rounds of level 3s, then 11yo and I stayed to help reset the gym back to normal for training for states in ~4 weeks. I’m feeling kind of pathetic as after guarding doors for two weekends and helping move heavy equipment everything from the back down are pretty sore (okay in hindsight it was probably stupid to lift the big p-bars by myself but I have good stances, maybe not as good as Zip’s but all I had to do was lift each end in turn so the floor protectors could be put under the feet) and…apparently while I can still use my hands for typing and poking at touch screens, I can’t draw. Well I can but working on @f3nix’s piece is taking way more concentration than it should.

And hopefully I’m not going to have any more backwards steps as I’m thoroughly over them! Our club is hosting regionals so weekend just gone has been extremely busy (hence why progblog is late) and there is another one is coming up next weekend which will hopefully be not quite as busy. With luck I’ll have this week’s progblog done on time, but it depends on whether we need to help set up on Friday night (as I tend to make progblogs on Friday nights, I do try to post them then as well but it can end up being sometime on the weekend if I don’t finish on time.

Obviously, I haven’t done uv mapping for a while. Last time was three years ago (jeez I’m so slow aargh it’s too late for me save yourselves). So while I remembered how they worked and seem to have gotten better at actually making/unwrwapping them, I managed to completely forget what they were. So when I was setting up the paint object, I automatically selected the largest they had available (16k), because in Krita I always paint on 16bit canvases.

I was actually intending to do this on Friday, but I was also setting up some new backup drives (my original drive was appropriated) and needed to copy the old backup from my computer (where it’s currently taking up a HELL of a lot of space!) and I found out the hard way that I can’t use 3d Coat and have big copy operations going at the same time because it makes my computer run out of memory.

I forgot to mention last update. Ages ago (6 years eep) I mashed a calendar for AER. Years later (because I always seem to notice glaring things years later, this does not bode well for whenever I finally get around to animating x_x) I suddenly realised, all the scientists in the Tranquility Calendar are guys. They were all great and interesting people but seriously? I mentioned this to darqx and said I wanted to “even” it out a bit (there’s 13 months so it’s going to be slightly lopsided but near enough is good enough as far as I’m concerned). So being the awesome sibling she is, she helped me find a whole pile of notable female scientists from a variety of fields (and by that I mean she found most of them in the time it took me to find a few because one of us can just do things and the other only just do things when the focus is there, and then I somehow had to choose which was bloody hard work).

After looking at how erratic my steem and Patreon feeds can be, I guess I really better put in the effort to make these weekly, perhaps showing off the pathetic amount of progress I didn’t make will kick me into working more harder smarter. So as I said last update I’m going back to what I know (which is keeping the polycount as low as possible) but experimenting in a slightly different direction (I have a probably unhealthy obsession with needing all the quads to be as square as possible so I tend to end up with slightly dense meshes).

Blender’s viewport is massively outdated and exceedingly laggy. This has made trying to correct the weights on the ~300k poly model of Red agonisingly painful and take way, way longer than it should be. I still have plans to do a proxy for animating with, but that doesn’t remove the need for the actual model to work. Apparently this will be fixed and updated later this year and from the sounds of the people who are braving it in its current bug-infested state, it will be wonderful. I’m not waiting around for it, I’ll just let it catch up to me which is highly likely.

Finally got all the stupid hair guides sorted and grouped, time for some expression testing! Which also gives me a chance to fix weight maps. The auto-weight mapping does a pretty decent job, but it’s not perfect and touchups around the place are usually required (like for some insane reason half the innermost wing membrane was associated with the little finger why).

I still haven’t worked out whether it’s better to keep a regular update even if it’s “I’m an idiot and got stuck again” or just not say anything if I’m that stuck. So after combing the hair into the right shape, I found out a few things. while the collision detection works really nicely in particle edit mode, it completely fails when actual physics is applied, because for whatever reason the emitter collision is completely ignored I can’t work out for the life of me how the hell to rig particle hair I’ve done spline IK for the tail rig so was trying to do something similar with the hair but don’t understand how particle weights work. Wasn’t the biggest leap to find out about curve guides, and then took me the better part of forever to work out that curve guides had to be on the same layer as the particle emitter to work. Once that was sorted out, I then spent way too long playing around with the different curve types to work out which one would be the best for the job. Seems that nurbs animates quickest so that’s what I’m using.