August ProgBlog #1: the plod of eternal slow

in #aer2 years ago

This week has been thoroughly boring as far as progress goes. Even the progress I made on roleplaying notes felt pretty meh.

The uv maps were so horribly borked that I decided I was just going to bite it and redo the sculpt (which is a comparatively easy thing to do).

While I was there I noted that some fixes which I thought I'd done with the base model hadn't actually been done, so decided I would actually do all the fixes on the base model that I was supposed to do, including applying basic textures, which is another thing I thought I'd already done.

There is a long running hardware problem which is steadily getting worse and worse. Most of the time I'm okay though it will sometimes decide to randomly crash because I was scrolling a document, but crashes are otherwise almost guaranteed when rendering. Lately it seems that texture work is also too much now as trying to do anything with textures maxes out the cpu sometimes for minutes. If I notice I wait it out, and everything if excruciatingly slower than it has to be right now because I'm looking out for it now so every time it maxes out I stop and wait minutes for it to settle down so I can click on something and watch it max out again for minutes (I'm only joking a little bit).

Most of the problem was happening when I was converting the demo procedural eyes to my base model's usual red eyes. Also had to fix the positioning of the inside of the mouth while I was there (it's yet another one of those things where I don't know how it went literal years without me noticing).

I ragequit after having a few more cpu surges and went to bed and this is where I'm at right now.

Here I'm tidying up the vertex weight maps for the down feathers as I've split them into front and back. They'll get paired with a texture map (I'm not sure if that's the correct/acceptable way to do that but I get much better coverage using vertex weights and texture map, and the texture map is just needed for the infinitely better control).

I eventually decided to go with the particle instances as I managed to get them to look okay and they render a hell of a lot faster than using particle clumps.

I'm still trying to work out positioning of the base and tip of the feathers as it's currently insisting on looking like it's overlapping the wrong way in renders even though it looks passable in the viewport.

And as a bonus, I've been poking at this on previous Toolsdays.

This is the spring version 15yo's Eladrin character that she's playing in 13yo's DnD game. I usually do sketch colouring on one layer but I'm splitting them out for this one as she didn't seem sure about what colours she wanted (she reckoned she was giving me options when she sent the text description of what she wanted).

I love painting long hair but I really hate drawing it x_x this one needed to be done sketchily though as I would need an actual background for rendered style and I already had in my head that I was going to do coloured panels as the background so coloured pencil sketch colouring of dubiousness was the way to go (I still don't know how I feel about this style, it does come out alright but I'm not sure the amount of input is worth the output, maybe it will be okay if I somehow manage to get faster at it).

This post also appears on my blog.

Want a cameo 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 :) Everything you need to know is (probably) here and if it isn't just ask (sorry the link goes offsite to my blog where the layout is how I want rather than the one here which is only here because the original one was).

Thanks for looking! ^_^

Fun Discord servers:

Hive Australia | Be Awesome | artbees | OnChainArt

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

Ask me nicely if you want an upgoat/cute critter footer.

Sort:  

Is your hardware old and not up to the job anymore? Is it time to upgrade? Might help!

It is getting on but should still be capable. Can't afford to upgrade yet x_x

Thats the problem that things move on so fast and stuff gets clogged up by regular or repeated working that it seems like no time at all before you feel you are being forced to upgrade!

It wouldn't be so bad if everything wasn't so cripplingly expensive.

Sibling dearest suggested that maybe it's the ssds that are the problem, so hoping I can scrounge enough money together to replace them as that will probably be cheaper than cpu/motherboard and if that ends up helping then I can kick the can down the road a bit further x_x

Yeah, the days of cheap bits for computers seem to be past us!

Hopefully the SSDs will work and you can get can kicking!

Just checking in to see if you did a walkabout Wednesday 😁

LoL I actually did, but I ran into some trouble on my server when I was posting it there (I post there before I post here, the watermarking thing stopped working at some point and it became a matter of principle to fix it, I haven't actually fixed it as I have no idea what's wrong but developed a workaround) so I'll be doing it soon, a day late for me -_-

The theme of the programs always bring some novelty, taking into account that these software are always in constant updating, however it should be noted that whoever wants can and I can always achieve something, both good and experimental, the theme of the molding seems very interesting, I see that it is a work of great effort, thank you very much for sharing this post on Hive, I hope to continue learning much more of your post.

Thanks ^_^

Experimenting is half the fun and most of how to learn :D

Congratulations @ryivhnn! You have completed the following achievement on the Hive blockchain and have been rewarded with new badge(s):

You received more than 70000 upvotes.
Your next target is to reach 75000 upvotes.

You can view your badges on your board and compare yourself to others in the Ranking
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word STOP

Check out the last post from @hivebuzz:

Hive Power Up Month Challenge 2022-07 - Winners List
The 8th edition of the Hive Power Up Month starts today!
Hive Power Up Day - August 1st 2022