Four years ago (x_x) I made this piece: Protective is actually 2 and the original Protective was badly drawn in a uni notebook a hundred million years ago Earlier this year I decided to “continue” this slightly older video There I was doing cloth sim, hair dynamics I think and also testing out this clumsy rig I’d made for the Avian crests. In this one I was purely testing the Dragonkin rig and trying extremely hard not to get distracted with (re)learning cloth sim and seeing if the new hair system could animate yet. I also made it slightly nicer than I normally would because it’s been a while since I animated properly.

It was this version of that song that was on my Spotify that did it. Then it was meant to be a brief interlude but I was trying to avoid cel shading because I hate doing it (I’m just straight up bad at it) but the other colouring styles weren’t working out (honestly it looked fine but not what I wanted) so I guess my brain decided that I needed to work on cel shading (and in some fairness to it I had kind of gone more anime/manga with this, Dak is the only one that would dual wield guns because his cybereyes can link up with his guns).

I got very briefly stuck when I found out that I don’t think I can do a double loop with the tail with five controllers. Firstly there was a lot of keyframe shenanigans which I kind of just did but didn’t really need to stress about that much for a rig test (but I kind of had to do it because I KNOW). I generally avoid frame by frame like the plague but sometimes it’s a thing that has to be done apparently.

Prehensile tails are a pain, why would anyone design a character with them. why do I have pretty much no control over this head-universe Trying to get this tail to wrap neatly has been an interesting experience. I’ve tried going forwards cleaning up everything between keyframes and going backwards from the shapes I wanted to end on and it seems I can break everything whichever way I do it so I’ve kept inching forwards as that seems to break things slightly less.

In my infinite wisdom I decided to stay up late again (to 1am which used to be normal bedtime once upon a time but I have been trying to make bedtime 10-10:30 for two decades x_x) to finish the blocking. So now I’ve been doing more fun stuff like arcing the arcs (so that things don’t just shortest path to the next keyframe like they were doing in the blocking video from the last post)

Blah blah blah the usual. A lot of my projeect work time got overrun by other things that needed to be done. Some of it was kind of unavoidable (like the couple of times a year we do performances, and competitions when they come up). The rest of it was just somehow I ended up being the one that absolutely had to do the thing because for some reason everyone else was completely and utterly incapable.

I spent the first two weeks of March editing a video out of several that I took on and off during an old friends reunion/meetup. It was supposed to be a quick job and in fairness it only took me a day to put together and do the basic editing and a couple of hours , but I had a problem with led flickering and trying to fix that resulted in ghosting in places which required a directly opposing solution and that was what I spent most of the two weeks on.

Happy slightly late silly season! A little bit late due to a combination of family shenanigans and whatnot, forgetting how to draw, doing a different method, realising that method would take too long, attempting to draw again, finally remembering how to draw and then trying to blitz it out around everything else in by then one day left, stymied slightly by a very fun new year party and actually finished it on time but then when I went to export it Krita and/or the MacBook started playing silly buggers and insisted on giving me blurry images and so I airdropped it to sibling dearest to see if she could work something out. She couldn’t get it to resize nicely either and after trying to work out if it was a brush problem or a Mac problem she ended up taking a screenshot and sending me that, and that is what got uploaded at the end of the night x_x

Alternate title: FREEDOM! Which is probably what Zara was screaming into the wind. Don’t do what Zara is doing, it’s very stupid and dangerous. And Megan’s seatbelt is currently not effective so don’t do that either XD And the pod windscreens are actually HUDs and Dakarai is looking at a rear view thing but the HUD can only be seen from inside the pod. The HUD is probably also screaming about an unrestrained passenger.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a last month of the year run according to any semblance of a plan and that may or may not have something to do with my persistent delusion that I can somehow continue doing the same thing plus all the extra time consuming things in the same amount of time. Pro-tip: it never works. The end of year display was great, and I had the “brilliant” idea to film the whole thing (I did get permission from the head coach to do it first) and edit them all together.