DevLog: Bone Problems & Big Finishes

Quick reminder: You can follow development more closely on the Trello board.

TLDR;

• OMG CRASHING - Willow character emergency fix

• Last Scene of this Update - Final Stretch

• Automation, automation, automation

✅ Last Week's Progress

What I accomplished since the last update:

• Portability project needs another week to cook - let's see how it goes

• You know, ever since moving to Linux (this is how I start every conversation now apparently, "Linux, Linux, Linux"), I've been doing a lot of troubleshooting and system monitoring. While working on some scene work remotely from my MacBook, using NoMachine (good, free software; go try it), the interface partially locked up. I was super annoyed so I tried using Ubuntu's built-in remote desktop software - what was crazy, was that it was less "locked-up" than NoMachine's user-interface, but it was still only kind of working. Certain things worked, the Ubuntu settings was good, Blender was kind of locked up. Strangely, I could go to the taskbar, and reboot.
  After rebooting and SCOURING my logs for any clue, I discovered something fucking terrifying. Goddamn Willow's character had a Circular Dependency. If there's anybody who's also into programming, you know that this is essentially unusable and causes, at random times: extremely unstable code. (Circular Dependency happens for example you have: Bone A depends on Bone B, Bone B depends on Bone C, and Bone C depends on Bone A. The dependency tree is recursive, or starts from where it started - hence the name) This isn't a good thing, it's a terrible thing. And it was all my fault. I added bones to Willow's character to support her necklace and her earrings, but I added too many dependencies which created a circular reference in her rig. I ended up taking a day and a half to re-work Willow's dependency bone tree (Trello Task Here). Whether this was contributing to the system instability, I'm not certain yet - but at minimum, it needed to be fixed regardless. ✅

• Created and rigged a paperclip - very important stuff here...

🛠️ Current Development

What I'm working on right now:

• Last Scene of this Update - This final scene of this update is going to be a bit ambitious. It might be the most renders for any of the scenes so far, plus an animation (giggity). As you can see if you click that link (which goes to the Trello board), I've currently got about 30 images ready to render. I'm going to super duper ballpark guess, that this entire scene will be 300 to 500 images; super ballparking. So you can kind of get a guess at where I'm at with this scene 🤓

⚙️ Technical Corner

Automation = Exponential speed. I wanted to share an example I came across for the case of "automating as much as you can." There's a case in my workflow where I want to hide hundreds of environment props, not only from my working view but also from the final render. For each prop, this takes two clicks with a total of 5 seconds... sounds quick, sure. But when you need to toggle hundreds of props SEVERAL TIMES in a scene, we're not only talking about tedious and mind-numbing but we're talking a huge chunk of time wasted!
Instead, I took less than 10 minutes to write a Blender Python script that automates the entire process for me. What used to take minutes or even tens of minutes to show/hide visibility of objects, now takes less than 10 seconds. This is typically the approach that I've been taking since beginning Echoes of The Cataclysm; I tried to document things I've learned and write scripts to automate my workflows so that the next time* I encounter said thing, it takes little to no time at all.

👀 Sneak Peek

I was going to provide some environmental sneak peeks, but I think it might be too early - I'm gonna show more next week.

BUT ALSO:
Door by door, chamber by chamber, look through these portals and wonder: who built these walls to protect,
and who rebuilt them to contain?

First render of the next scene (not full resolution).

💎 Hidden Gems

PinkSpectre - That's all I'm going to say.

Don't forget to check out the Trello board for detailed progress updates! ❤️