Progress Report, 28/05 - 21 (Patreon)

Hello everyone, I managed a solid 4 hours of sleep last night, so welcome to a brief progress report!

This week has once again primarily consisted of a technical dive, particularly in order to figure out the intricacies of basic sculpting on pre-existing models for purposes of permanent, custom modification. While I am still waiting on my orc female model for the purposes of my comic, I've realized that the 2 years that I have spent waiting is plenty of time to simply learn the trade myself, if anything to be able to create my own custom models from scratch at some point. Thus, above, is my first attempt at some custom sculpting on an .OBJ model ripped from the game, with textures ran through an AI upscaling tool (because holy crap are WoW textures rough). While primitive, unrigged, and not weight painted yet, it is a proof of concept of what I'll, eventually, be able to consistently do on my own if I just put time and effort towards it.

Ripping, sculpting, texturing, rigging, painting, etc might be a time-consuming matter to first learn, never mind then do for the models I want in question, but I pursue this avenue with the long-term goal in mind of eliminating the reliance on other model creators for the models we utilize here.

More importantly, my computer parts have, rather randomly, appeared at my doorstep. Though slated for a big "maybe" to arrive the 29:th of this month, my Ryzen 5 5600X and its cohorts suddenly decided to get in stock, and get thrown in my general direction. It might be that I just got lucky and someone cancelled their order, allowing me their spot in the queue for the damn thing, thus enabling them to send the whole bulk order as the CPU was the final puzzle piece we were waiting for.

This weekend I will thus be undertaking the potentially hazardous ordeal of tearing out most of the things inside my chassis and replacing it with new components. While I've done this plenty of times and it's unlikely I'll break anything physically, it remains to be seen how Windows 10 and other software will respond to a sudden shift in hardware configuration. While I have my operating system on a separate SSD, I'll be taking some precautions by safety-copying some of the more vulnerable models I've acquired over the years, as well as some session files I'd abhor to lose, as Microsoft's darling is a fickle mistress that still might demand a full formatting of my HDDs.

If all things go smoothly I ought to be able to deliver on my update schedule just as usual, but I want to give a heads up that the Monday Loop might have to be pushed in the event where my rig decides to do what all computers have a tendency to do and simply mess with me. The machine spirit is hard to predict, if anything.

Commission work is still underway, so please, those promised slots in the past, keep an eye on your inboxes as I'll try to rapidly go through those that remain, one by one, over the course of the coming month or two. In the event I stop receiving answers for a week or so, I'll be moving on to the next commissioner, making a note that I still owe the commissioner in question but bumping them down the list.

Art trades are still on-going as well, so look forward to all that entails in the future :)

I might also have another Scenario cooking, but more on that when I've sorted out the hardware matters. Art never announced can never be missed or a source of disappointment for never happening, in that sense, so I'm keeping the lid on it for a little longer to see if it'll truly go somewhere.

As always, thank you so much for your continued support, and for all of your kind words. While these are tumultuous times, there is no other path but forward - in that, we have little choice. Time demands its toll, but we fight on none the less.

Take care of yourselves, and each other!
/DH