And the forever unchanging habit of failing weekly progblogs because I feel bad about not progging enough.
at least this is one of the few times I have the somewhat reasonable excuse of it was silly season and January will still be my planning month because that's been working out well so far
I have been doing the hair strands in pairs which is one of the reasons why it's been taking the better part of forever. Doing it in larger groups/rows has previously always ended badly for me. Recently I spat it and decided it's been a while, let's just see how we go.
We didn't go too badly.
In fact, it's worked out pretty well.
It very definitely could have been much worse.
I made the usual mistake of staying up late because "I just want to finish this" and of course there were problems at the end. My test render showed a puff of hair that wasn't anywhere in the viewport (which I didn't get a screenie of as it was late and I was mad because I just wanted the hair to be done). Quick search later and apparently it had something to do with subdivision levels so I bumped the viewport levels up to the same as the render levels and lo and behold, the puff appeared.
It became a later problem and I spent that later combing it all down again.
It was looking pretty good and I was reasonably happy.
Then the inevitable struck. I eventually worked out that my density map wasn't working because the hair was trying to use a uv map that was still floating around for a scalp model that didn't exist anymore. I switched it to using the uv map of the character which made the density map work. For reasons unknown to me but which probably make perfectly logical sense to the program, at the render multires level everything shifted over to the right and in some cases the hairs were either floating in space or reattaching to the horns.
I wasn't sure how to fix that so I started again (I was too exasperated to care at this point because starting all the way over again to fix compounding problems that grow increasingly insurmountable is perfectly normal at this stage) but able to use less guides with a slightly higher distance now that the density map was working properly.
The next glitch I encountered was multires itself, where apparently jumping up and down levels made it freak the hell out and send spikes everywhere.
That also became a later problem because I just wanted to get the hair done but I did have to watch it getting progressively worse.
I also had to just stay on level 0 because anything higher was making the curve glitch out. And either way I think the brushes were glitching out on me too, I don't know whether it was the brushes or me but either way there were chunks of time where I couldn't understand what they were trying to do and why.
The puff came back when I got to the front of the head.
I have no idea why multires is displacing the curve guides. But I at least have a nicer hairline and the child hairs are not creeping over onto the horn crest like they were before.
I'm going to do eyebrows and eyelashes and then work my way up through multires levels trying to fix the problems as I seem to have triggered some bug (specifically the propagation ones). The extra work days I was able to schedule in have been really helpful while I've got them (they are a holiday only thing).
This post also appears on my blog.
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