P Stewart @pstewart@mastodon.sandwich.net

Ah, the joys of "this should be an easy, two-person setup that takes a few hours" snowballing into a "nope, needed three people and eleven to assemble" instead.

Future Me's gonna resent Present Me quite a bit tomorrow.

#ow

Enjoying a rare local occurrence of an Actual Proper Thunderstorm; those are normally a once-every-few-years treat around here, anyway.

Also, realtime lightning detection maps are just *neat*. North America is apparently super bonkers in terms of zappiness compared to the rest of the planet...

Whee, think I finished it. Weekend project, weeklong project, they both have the same number of syllables. Manual UVmapping remains painful but the rest was fun, and gradually getting a better handle on textures is as well.

Original sketch version courtesy of @PixelMonsterBot and the end result of rebuilding it:

#Blender3D #3DArt

Finally plugging along at the fun parts of the latest #Blender3D thingy after suffering through UV mapping.

I kinda love how the "toss down the initial colours" phase is basically zero-effort. Toddlers are expected to colour inside the lines, but at this stage of things? Not meeee!

Whee, when one of what was supposed to be a series of daily #Blender3D projects for practice snowballs into what's going to end up being a week-long project instead. Not sure if that's procrastinating on a habit I'm trying to build up or just branching out after a few dozen mostly-successful meshes, but...

Yet more #Blender #3DArt output, and hooray for the people picking the pixelcritter to 3D-ize finally moving away from the "CGA or vaporwave?" colour schemes.

Of course then they had to pick one that made me nostalgic for the Wing Commander series. Games in that general genre/style need to exist again dammit.

Already feeling like this'll be the one I try to revisit in higher detail later...

Still having fun getting some #3DArt practice back in with the 30-minute #Blender renders, and enjoying that the colour scheme on the latest one had friends reacting with "omg CGA" or "omg vaporwave" depending on their age.

Thinking another week of those, a weekend doing another redo-in-more-detail, then off to figuring out more complex projects. (Or just spending awhile trying to Finally Attempt To Grok Materials...)

Update on the #3DArt front: manual UV unwrapping *and* trying to relearn how this particular version of #Blender3d handles textures compared to any previous version remains painful. Plus ca change..

That said, Progress(tm)! 30-minute render based off one of @PixelMonsterBot 's critters, then coming back to that for a slightly more detailed version, then texturing that in full.

Feeling decent about how things are coming along so far!

Well, the "Space Invaders-esque critter into 3D mesh in 30 minutes" exercise I've been doing the last several days in #Blender definitely feels like it's working. Certainly has my brainmeats feeling less cobwebby after far too long outside of a 3D program.

Can't UVmap and texture that quickly though, so figured I'd give myself the weekend to revisit one of the doodles, rebuild it in detail, and paint it up. Onward!

(Manual UV unwrapping remains deeply painful. Sigh.)

Turns out as far as #Blender practice/relearning goes, picking a random sprite @PixelMonsterBot makes and seeing how quickly I can transform it from a 7x7-pixel blotch into a 3D object works, and is kinda fun to boot.

Whee!

Dusting off Blender for the first time in awhile, long enough to have jumped from 2.8x to 3.1.

Time for another round of Find Small Projects To Doodle As I Flail Around Relearning The Interface Yet Again! Huzzah!

Just as I find my brain's starting to go back onto its on-and-off ancient/prehistoric mythology kick, thinking about various devices and motifs, how far back they go, and what they might have originally been like, I stumble across @mythologybot and am thus presented with some more braincandy along those lines. Yay!

(The fact that Thompson's Motif Index is a thing that exists as all brings me much glee.)

Gotta love the de-facto blank slate thing, where I'm poking at this regularly again, definitely of a mind to Write Something In It and Do Something With It, and just not sure what exactly.

I dunno if I've been nailed by the whole "your social media presence must be Your Brand(tm) so you need Your Theme(tm)" thing, or if it's just that "okay, what next/first?" stuckishness one gets from a brand new sketchbook.

(the extend-o-doldrums of the Plague Years probably hasn't helped. Whee!)

[insert post about actually dusting this account off for the first time in ages for some mysterious reason]

[insert paragraph of fediverse metacommentary since t'is, for some mysterious reason, the season]

And now to figure out how I want to go about un-barrenizing my home timeline, which could probably use more than a handful of humans and the admittedly delightful AI Art Bot...