Endless time sink projects!

It has been a difficult but exhilarating semester.

We made a makerspace! Here it is all packed up because we needed to move it to another location last week.

Thinking about the makerspace ate up all my waking hours since it opened. After a few months I started to feel unsettled by how little other identity I had left. Makerspace director is an all-encompassing role in two senses--having to do nearly everything related to it, having everything you do be related to it. You only ever get to make one thing, the makerspace.

But at the end of the semester I have found a little time to think and regroup. I need to make things in addition to making the makerspace. I'm not one to do anything casually enough to call it a hobby. So... I've started up the Blender Graphic Novel project again.

Because it seemed like complete and utter folly to reopen that project (another infinite time sink), first I tried lots of things, like watching movies and going out to eat with friends. But nothing else seemed to plug the hole.

Comic from Dresden Codak

So, just like with the makerspace project, I try the impossible thing anyway, then it doesn't always go well, then in private I cry and get angry, and then I use that anger to rhetorically dare myself to give up, which I will never do, so I swear stubbornly to try again, and the cycle repeats. And sometimes on a night like tonight I even make some promising incremental progress.

Incremental progress. Just testing out a few concepts

What I've learned in re-opening the project for the first time since 2016:

I'm still relying heavily on Blendswap for assets, but it feels like that website/community has lost some momentum. The environment above is from https://www.blendswap.com/blend/10299
Most of the assets I had found in the past still seem to be there so that's good, but the search function is pretty bad and all my Likes/Collections from before are now all empty.

In 2018 Manuel Bastioni decided to try raising funds for the MBLab project, but after about three days he gave up and shut the whole project down. It seems he expected a large audience to materialize (with not much thought given to advertising) and that most of them would immediately donate. The project is now on Github https://github.com/animate1978/MB-Lab

Marvelous Designer is up to version 9 from version 6, and it seems the same. I'm a little frustrated with it but at the same time it is the only tool that does what I need, and it gets good results (but slowly due to clunky workflow).

The sewing pattern community is still disappointing. Everybody seems only interested in making a few bucks here and there for the patterns in their collection. Very few community seems really attuned to concepts like public domain, digitally archiving historical patterns, getting into the nitty gritty of patent, trademark, copyright law, first sale doctrine, and understanding how it does and doesn't potentially affect sewing patterns and fashion. I wanted to try paying for ready-made Marvelous Designer garment assets but found very few for sale.

Blender Internal is gone in Blender 2.8 and I'm using Eevee instead. Freestyle still works, and is still pretty slow. Eevee is much faster than Cycles and I really don't need raytracing for the style I'm going for. I can use viewport rendering which helps workflow, so long as I keep the number of vertices sane.

Big directions to explore next:
- Hair...still difficult. Need to practice a bit.
- How to effectively storyboard so I don't waste time on scenes and assets I don't need, and so that the pages and chapters are cohesive (visually, and from a storytelling perspective)

https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/eccj2/how_to_draw_an_owl/