That's not an acronym, just me screaming in annoyance.
The underside of the wing was the absolute worst thing ever as no matter how I moved the feathers, gaps kept appearing.
Sunday was a super slow day to begin with as the bigs and I were recovering from doing a show on the Saturday (they were more tired than me as they were the ones actually flipping out and stuff, I was just kind of trying to help direct as I'd been unexpectedly thrust into that role as the coach who had been supposed to be doing that job had unfortunately come down with something the night before).
I did try to get some stuff done and it was mostly rearranging feathers. It's one of those things where 20% of the work takes up 80% of the time. In this case, it seemed like no matter how I moved the feathers around, these large gaps would keep appearing andw ould need more shuffling around to try and cover up, and just when I thought I had it right, there would suddenly be another one.
Just doing that ended up somehow occupying most of the day (though I was moving extremely slowly because I was that freaking tired). At least it was only on the underside, the topside didn't give me any problems.
On Monday I tried working on Aoife again and got the skin somewhat workable. Then spent a lot of time trying to work out how I was going to do the hair. I did try for either a green or pink undertone to the other coloured hair and could not get anything to look good. So currently have decided it's green with pink shimmer seeing as we have a shiny reflecting the opposite colour thing happening.
Obviously I haven't done the shading for it yet.
I've been doing slightly better in the getting to bed at a reasonable hour department, and a term later I think I've got a handle on the lesson planning and general group coaching nonsense, so hopefully I'll be able to sort out all the things that have been all over the joint as I've been trying to get used to new things.
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How about you select all the feathers and increase their scale by a few % in the X and Y. Maybe this would help hide the gaps.
I just finished building myself a new computer with a 3070 graphics card. Looking forward to playing with Blender more now that I can get acceleration. The new hair in 3.5 looks amazing.
Glad you're learning to sleep again. For me, it is still on my list of things to do.
I got there eventually, just made the end few feathers a tiny bit bigger as I'd had to move everything down anyway, and I kind of managed to just shuffle everything else around adequately eventually XD
Yay for new rig! Manjaro repo hasn't dropped 3.5 yet, I'm not doing hair yet anyway so I'll just wait longer. Knowing my luck I'lk have to redo the hair that I've done or I'll find that any updates they've done from 3.4 will let me do feathers the way I wanted to originally after all of that aaaahhhhhhhh XD
Looking forward to seeing your creations :D
Might you be able to generate the wings with nodes? Every year I'm stunned with what I see people do during Nodevember. Perhaps there's a node wizard out there who could point you in the right direction?
I'm pretty sure I saw someone do it as a geometry nodes experiment, flapping and everything. I tried figuring out geonodes but it's a lot to learn and I'm not particularly smart so nothing was sticking, and I wasn't having a lot of luck making particle instancing look good. At this stage I bought someone else's hair nodetree to use and also a feather generation thing which makes amazing feathers but sadly something was out of date in it and materials weren't working even in the demo file.
I might just wait for 3.5 to get into the Manjaro repos as it looks like some hair curve controls that I needed are finally in and I may get to do my fluffy feathers after all (which will make my render times awful and probably make my computer crash more but the feathers tend to look nicer). Because I love repeat work so very much -_-
Wait for 3.5 to land in the repos? Compile the latest version yourself. I did for quite a while.
Or you can install 3.5.0 via FlatPak.
https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.blender.Blender
Long render times? Why don't you use the Sheepit render farm. I've used it before. Peter Gric uses it extensively.
https://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com/
I'm partly too lazy and mostly it's extra effort that I really don't want to expend even if it is easy (I have installed stuff externally before and compiled stuff from source before, and also hacked on stuff if it's annoyed me enough which is scarier and more annoying if I forget to note down what I did which was almost always at one stage x_x), I mental load a lot of other things to the point of headache already (some of which I shouldn't actually be doing and most of which is purely because I have an uncooperative brain so doing that work takes me a lot longer than it should) so every now and then I just want things done for me for a change.
And having said all that I just noticed there's a full system update and Blender 3.5 is in it so speak of the devil? XD
I ran the sheepit client for a bit mostly helping other people render, I haven't done it for a while recently as I think I need a new cpu/logic board/both, I've replaced a few other components but it still likes to randomly crash when I'm rendering (doesn't happen all the time, just often enough to be annoying) or playing Minecraft (had immediate crashes when I started it up). Also have rendered a couple of rig test animations on sheepit to test it out and I'm way too overprotective of some of my stuff to run with it for the moment (may change down the line) x_x
Ah so you're using a distro that isn't a rolling release. I use OpenSuse Tumbleweed, rolling release, because I always have to have the latest shiny new toy, even if I'm not using them. 😁
LoL same XD which is why I switched from Ubuntu. Manjaro is a rolling release, I call the big ones full system updates as everything in official seems to get done at once.
Yes, Tumbleweed also periodically drops a big release. KDE6 will drop soon, which will mean upgrading nearly everything.
I finally after years of urging, had my girlfriend hand over her laptop for me to install Linux. So I can do two updates at once, with one USB stick.
The only reason she gave in, was M$ are soon dropping support for whatever Windoz version was installed. As promised, she doesn't even notice she's using Linux, since her computer usage is very limited.
Another soul and computer saved! Hellajula! Praise be Linux! 😁
Geometry nodes are the way to go. They give you a visual overview of what you're doing.
I love geonodes. They're just too much for my meagre brain to handle. I can barely too shader nodes and they're a lot easier ^_^;
One day when I have a decent GPU card, then I'll lose myself in it.
And then I'll be asking you to help me understand geonodes XD
I know nothing. 😄
That sounds like a positive :<)
Funny that you write about struggling with feathers, while I talk about my favorite bird Cold Turkey
and getting back to coffee.
They say that great minds think alike ;<)
Hope you manage to rest a little and I'm sure everything will work out, in the end.
Big hug!
It is a positive! The only downside to going to bed earlier is that because I'm less utterly exhausted I am back to being woken up at get stuffed o'clock when J gets out of bed XD
he does try very hard not to wake me up, I just wake up easily
It doesn't seem to unusual for us to find the same frequency lately XD and my feed is semi-regularly an exercise in synchronocity (I never know whether it should be counted or not when it's Taraz and Galen but at other times I've been chuckling at the stuff I see).
Everything will work out at some point, there are often times where I wish it would just have worked out forever ago >_< I've so far managed to get more sleep the last couple of nights and I'm now some weird blend of simultaneously feeling better for it and also still feeling tired all the time (but in a different way) as apparently I have a lot of sleep to be catching up on aaaaaahhhhhhh XD