Skip to main content
Jun
27
2022

June ProgBlog #2: because you know...instances

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.

May
18
2022

May ProgBlog #3: major schedule rejigs

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.

May
09
2022

May ProgBlog #2

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.

May
02
2022

May ProgBlog #1

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

playing with particle instances in Blender 3.1.2   playing with particle instancing in Blender 3.1.2

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

Apr
25
2022

April ProgBlog 3: The Infernal Hair Continues

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

Apr
18
2022

April ProgBlog #2: INFERNAL HAIR

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

luscious unstyled particle hair locks

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

Blender 3.1 hair settings gone wild

Apr
11
2022

April ProgBlog #1: speaking of ridiculous things

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

Gundry scraggly hair Blender 3.1

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.

deflect emitter still doesn't work

Mar
28
2022

March ProgBlog #4: when you forget little things

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).

incorrect hair settings

There is always something ridiculous in 3d.

At least that's relatively easily fixed.

eyebrows and eyelashes with better hair settings

Mar
22
2022

March ProgBlog 3

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

Mar
14
2022

March ProgBlog #2 - eternal tooling

I had a cascade of stuff happen over the last two weeks.

Just stuff, nothing really major or bad but enough of that and not enough sleep that I can't remember what most of it was.

Also enough that when I was supposed to progblog last week I looked at how much progress I'd made from last week (virtually none) and went nup and bailed.

First, let's cover some prog (seeing as that's the original purpose of these and probably what most people are interested in).

Prog

I have two more toes to go on Gundry.

sculpting foot in Blender 3