April ProgBlog #1: deja vu

Almost fell into old habits of not posting because I'm currently stuck in November as far as progress on stuff I was supposed to be working on (before getting massively sidetracked by the Rewrite the Stars songpic).

Now I had actually gotten a fair way further than this and was doing pretty all right when I realised two things.

The first was that I couldn't work out how to handle the transition of scales down the legs. My current thoughts are perhaps just armouring half the legs so that the leg froof makes sense, but apparently the whole thing is scaly because the tattoo artist character who designed it was kind of sticking to tradition (if I had my way it would have tough skin that kind of looked like they might be scales because then the froof would make sense but I have no control over this thing even though I occasionally think I do or pretend to).

The second thing? I'd stuffed up my numbers while on Christmas Island (where I was doing most of the scale work) and so they weren't as glossy as they needed to be to get the light play that gives the illusion that the tattoo responds to lighting conditions.

Which is why I had to start again. Again. Because I can't just go over the top with this brush as things get super messy.

On the bright side I've figured out some additional settings (including setting the flow to dots so I don't have slip errors) and gotten more used to how the brush works so I can erase sections if I need to without necessarily erasing the whole bloody thing (which I've occasionally had to do while on Christmas Island because erasing parts mucked up the previous sections as well), which is really useful as I try to work out the legs.

At least I know how to do hair with a standard brush if I need to (there are hair texture brushes but I'm thoroughly not used to how 3dC hair brushes work) so the rest of this thing should go pretty quick once I get past the freaking scales.

I've also been doing more data entry stuff (copying info from my exploded wiki into a much easier to manage replacement I made with Drupal for those just joining or who have forgotten because it's been a while since I mentioned wiki stuff).

We're still in the past but further along than I was before (which was back in the 200s in Nov ProgBlog #1 from last year jeez seriously deja vu XD). I had to do some Views fiddling of the sorting importance to make the rows stay in the order I wanted them in, and will probably start doing some prettification work as breaks in the not too distant future as there are some ux things that are really starting to bug me (such as the link content modal not being big enough) as well as sheer ugliness making some things hard to read, I mean look at this.

That's supposed to be a character profile thing. So much wasted space.

Youngest has been asking me when I'm going to finish my animation and I told him never as all my work time keeps getting eaten up. He's promised to go to bed on time so that it stops eating into my work time (I've explained several times to him already that I work after he goes to bed and the longer and harder he fights about going to bed either the less I have or I stay up later, neither of which are good options, think he's finally getting it). And next term I'm not doing the school run, so I'll get that 5hrs that I unsuccessfully tried to relocate back.

And hopefully we'll find a house to move into soon so we don't have that hanging over our heads (I still have stuff to clean and sort out and I don't want to I just want to draw aaaargh moving sucks and I hate the weekends being occupied by home opens).

ps - pfft now there's a botch job url because I failed to notice that it had copied over the wrong title XD This is why you don't post at bedtime.

This post also appears on my blog and Patreon.

Want a crowd character? If you interact frequently with me here (either on my posts or your posts or better yet both!) or on one of the linked Discord channels, all you have to do is let me know and tell me what you'd like :) It can be one of your characters (including ones you make up on the spot for this XD) or a self insert. There's a bunch of different human types to choose from, and pets/other animals are also welcome.

Thanks for looking! ^_^

Come hang out on Discord with us!

#teamaustralia on PAL | ANZ | Be Awesome | steemartists

_{-={ commission info | ko-fi | patreon }=-}

_{The steemaroo divider is free to use. Ask me nicely if you want an upgoat/cute critter footer.}