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.
And appointments and work-related stuff kept running over project work time and everything else. My house skipped two weeks of cleaning and is only not a cesspit because eldest helps a lot.
Red's hair got finished and I went to throw him and Zip into a scene to do rig test anim. First problem encountered, I'd modelled Zip's visor in several parts and not grouped them which would have been easy enough to remedy except that I decided I didn't like that version of the goggles that much.
So I made another one.
It's only very slightly better but at least it's one model.
Take 2 with the rig test anim and the next problem I encountered was that while the rig was still functional most of the controls had vanished and the usual trick of rerunning the script wasn't working. Something something updates.
Fortunately Rigify has an update metarig button so that got pressed and then the rig got regenerated and everything went back to normal.
Then I had the problem of the geonode hair I was using (a system that I'd bought because I couldn't figure out how to do it myself) was still too heavy so I figured it probably needed to be redone using the handy dandy hair modifier thingies that now shipped with Blender.
Well whatever it looks better now.
And it's quicker.
And then it was on to setting up includng somewhat (not trying for exact) matching where I ended the last test video I did about a hundred billion years ago (link is going offsite to my blog rather than the copy here so it's one less click to play the video) because this is a continuation.
everything is connected
I removed the cloth modifier that had been on Zara's pants and just auto-weighted them to use the armature as the focus of this is the Dragonkin rig.
there was also an epic mental battle to not try to figure out how to animate the hair at this point
And THEN I realised that Red's eyelashes and eyebrows hadn't been done. I swear I did them but it might have been one of those things where it didn't save (most of the time I save obsessively but apparently every now and then I completely forget and then Blender or kwin crashes and there are other times where I know I've saved but then the little star reappears on it even though I haven't touched it for days sometimes and then occasionally somehow stuff has been lost).
Wops.
Then I had to try to remember whether or not I moved the armature in Object or Pose mode when blocking. I'm reasonably certain I have done moving the entire object before but after doing the familiar having to start again thing because I muffed something early on when I started Red walking I decided switching modes was too much effort so left the object origins at world origin and just moved the root bone.
It's definitely easier this way right now, I'll see if anything breaks later when they're having to move large distances I guess.
And then when I tried to actually add this post to the blogsite I had to switch some logic in my figure shortcode around because hugo suddenly decided that it was going to choke and die on a gif in one of my old posts which it had no problems with before. Fix was easy enough (converted to webp first instead of last in the processing list) but what a stupid random problem.
This post also appears on my blog.
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