After last progblog I decided to break from doing the Avian model and work on the Dragonkin one for a bit. First level of panic was that the proportions were really different.

That calmed down very quickly when I remembered…I only need the wings and everything in that area was proportional enough.

_{I technically do need the tail but I could just pull that one out if the existing one wasn't in the right spot and given the different topology of both models it may end up in a slightly different spot anyway}

Gundry still has not budged.  I was supposed to do more work on him today but I ended up doing other things instead.  I also need to have a chat with my young friend and find out if we're still going along with...well I hesitate to call what we were working off any kind of plan, not even a loose and fluid one if this project is still going to go.

I think/hope I'm getting closer with the particle feather instancing.  Using two feathers (it's still technically one feather, the second one is a linked duplicate) and two vertex groups I've managed to get them to align the way I want, but of course now there's the problem of the shape is not quite right so I have to figure out how to get them to layer correctly.

Precious little got done over the last week on anything as I discovered a fatal flaw in my scheduling. I have roleplaying stuff scheduled for most of the weekend (currently only playing every other Sunday so I just use the time for extra prep and generally failing to catch up with all the writeups I haven't done yet, am starting up a new weekly game with my three regulars next weekend though). After roleplaying I'm supposed to be working on UASG.

This works timewise except that I should be doing the writeups straight after the sessions because that makes the most sense. Some writeups take longer than others.

I've made zero progress on Gundry as there is a checkbox which I think I need to tick in Particle Edit mode to make the bake show up so I can edit it, and it seems to be a guaranteed crash.  So looks like at this stage unless the new hair system drops sooner than I'm expecting it, I pretty much have to go the curve guide/soft body route.

Which means trying to figure out why my curve guides refuse to stick to their bone hooks and putting up with hair flapping around in anime locks (which at least won't be too terrible for this project because it's kind of semi-anime anyway).

And after Gundry I'm just going to be stuck in general as I don't have descriptions of the other characters, and the only other one I can do I'm not sure if I'm still doing.

For the Avian base model I'm currently trying to make a particle feather that meets my expectations.  This is the start.

Decided to try particle feathers following this tutorial on BlenderArtists. Got about this far in

and realised that I will likely need different mapping on each side because of how the particles are distributing.

I thought I was on my last attempt.  I was going to try a few more things, and then give up and make a million curve guides again and down the line nut out soft body on curves (I probably need to nut it out anyway).  

The problem I was having was that it seems that regardless of whether or not the emitter (the entire character model in this case) was set to be a collision object or not, the hair would clip straight through it when I got it to drop.

Zara does not have this problem, but she also has very short hair which I put a non-zero pin goal strength on because it sticks up a little.  This made it flop without cutting through the hair.  So I decided to try the same thing with Gundry but despite a miniscule number (0.001), I still ended up with

I feel like it's an eternal struggle getting hair settings right.

Sometimes what feels like a slight movement in your hand makes for a huge settings change. 

Poor Gundry is copping a lot of flak for his amazing hair.

I was hoping that Blender 3.1 would have better hair physics (or at least actually emitter deflect) and I would be able to let it flop and bake before attempting to style it but no such luck.

Like changing the default root and tip settings for the hair (default root is set at 1m and I can't remember what default tip is).

There is always something ridiculous in 3d.

At least that's relatively easily fixed.

I'm on the third week of using Obsidian for a lot of things including organisation and I've worked out that the schedule I made for myself at the beginning of this year or end of last year or whenever it was does definitely work, it's me that's the problem (so about the usual).

I also kind of want to investigate what will blow up if I add markdown to the techno editor to make copypasta easier. But for now I have a plugin for Obsidian which copies markdown to html so moving the text is easy and it's just the images that require a bit more extra work (actual uploading for techno, and copy link or in the case of collages, screencapping for hive).

I didn't end up doing much on UASG because I was too busy writing roleplaying notes. Sunday was a lot more productive. Gundry got the default Ocean eyes from the CW Eye add-on