Another update. (Patreon)

Oof, forgot to post updates for a bit. Well, forgot and kinda pushed it out of my mind. This is a hard thing to make a habit out of for me. I prefer to hide and code.

So. The past few months have been very similar in terms of what I've been doing. It feels like I'm going in endless circles. This cycle looks like this: Oh no, the animation rig is messed up! Is it because of code? Yep. Fix the code. Wait, that messed up the rig even more. Fix the rig. Okay, but the rig's messed up in a new way for some reason. Is it because of code? Yep. Repeat.

We're in the "Fix the rig" stage atm, and I'm feeling good about the stability of it right now. But we've been here before, so I'm also worried about feeling good about things. Does this actually mean I'm close to the end now, or is it just false hope?

From nightmarish sights like this:

To confusing ones:

To the unsettling:

And whatever was happening here:

It's hard to feel confident when one day, I think I've got everything pretty much handled, and the next, everyone is morphing into cosmic horrors.

Existential crisis aside, this is all actually good progress. Also the rigs look pretty normal again, with the added bonus of all the animation updates. It's been kind of grueling though.

Currently I'm giving a little extra care to the asset creation pipeline. I'm finding myself spending a lot of time fixing minor visual glitches (like limbs or mouths being misaligned and stuff). Having an orderly path to get from art -> vector -> rigged asset -> meshed asset -> fully skinned is super important, cause if I need to make a minor tweak to all the legs (which I did) then it eats up a ton of time if it's not organized. 

Mainly, I've been grouping all the characters' body parts based on general sizes, and linking all the similarly-sized parts together in a shared mesh. Basically, if I make a tweak to a leg, for example, that tweak will apply to all similarly-sized legs. I've resisted doing this in the past because it seemed like too much work, but the results have immediately shown to be a time-saver.

Anyway, it's late, so that's all for now. Sorry for the gap in posts! It's the fault of my introverted, uses-avoidance-as-a-coping-mechanism brain.

Originally I'd planned on posting a progress update after each stream, so I'm gonna go back to that schedule. That means there'll be another post tomorrow. I'll include answers to questions I've been getting, along with any developments that happen during stream time. 

As a reminder to those who can make it- streams are at picarto.tv/DaiLevy on Thursdays at 12pm to 4pm PST.

See y'all tomorrow. <3