#and I've been troubleshooting to hell and back and still NOTHING

[daincrediblegg]

going to fucking cry the fucking sims won't launch

[chipped-chimera]

Okay since I'm actually awake now, (proper) HAIR UPDATE! ❤️🖤❤️

I wanted to add this onto my post from last night but tumblr hates reblog photosets. Anyways I was very aware that posting my V in the darkest corner of an apartment with black hair wasn't really ... showing anything - but it was very much her vibe and that's been the point of this entire project, buckling down and learning Blender from nothing, reverse-engineering mods and systems I was only NEW to about a month or so ago so I could figure out how to bring 'back' her hair, but like ... even more how I wished it was.

And it's finally done (well ... structurally).

More development rambles beloooow ~

I'm not releasing this (yet) as I'd now put myself in 'polish' phase, where I'll be tweaking some physics and other stuff like the vertex painting which influences the shine - brighter hair colours look a bit too blown out at the moment, and I'm not sure if this is because it's too shiny or because of my custom normals (may have to tone them down a bit, idk). You can see what I mean below -

Shadows are also behaving oddly at certain angles, and I wasn't sure if it was a harsh lighting situation but upon changing the lighting up ... no. Something weird is going on. So that'll need troubleshooting (for lighter colours at least). Also some textures just are acting weird on certain parts when I don't think they should look that way so yeah ... more ... troubleshooting ahead. :V

I'm also going to look into if there's something I can do for the 'efficiency' of this mesh because I noticed some pretty severe frame slowdowns taking close up shots - though only sometimes?? Not sure what that was about at all. I'm assuming it's my gpu being pushed harder as I get closer to the hair, but upon changing the hair in the character creator to another and then back it just went away again? So no idea what the hell was going on there. It felt a bit almost like a memory leak, but I didn't do a check to see what my system was doing so I'll have another look if it happens again.

Possible (hypothetical) causes:

Could be texture size, these hair cards have 2k textures apart from the alpha (4k) which is double vanilla textures so that is also a possibility as a fix (though I'd be loathe to do it).

Double rigs. I noticed last night when in my rigging phase with UUH4V that reducing it from three meshes and rigs to TWO meshes and two rigs significantly improved framerate lag (I mean it was minor but noticeable enough) in the character creation screen, so it could hypothetically be something to do with calculations of running two rigs at the same time. If that is the case, I could probably just rig this to the Alt hair rig. Currently I'm using Alt's for the back and left side of the hair, whereas the fringe at the front and the curl over the shoulder is rigged to Old Rogue. I'll probably still keep using UUH4V just … one rig only.

Last in the list? Hair cards. There are a lot. Maybe too many. They're also of a higher poly than last time. That said I've looked at other mods with heavier polycounts than mine (what gave me the courage to push further in the first place after my very low poly attempt 1.0) that caused more obvious frame slowdown in just the character creator alone. I feel there is still a minor slowdown currently but it's on the edge of noticeable (like, 30fps vs 60fps). As it goes though, this is still pretty insanely efficient (thank YOU Hair Tools for Blender).

BONUS: Mods. Other mods. The thing I use to hook in a DLL for pose control. Could always be that?

So uh, guess that's what I'll be working on. I don't know how much time I should be spending on getting this 'frame efficient' considering anyone using this would be primarily be for screenshots, and given the specs I'm currently running (AMD Ryzen 5 CPU and an RTX 2060) are being re-classed as the 'bare minimum' with Phantom Liberty coming out, and I am planning on upgrades to my PC anyway.

We'll see? (Though in my heart of hearts, I have have had potato PCs for years and I want to support the lowest specs I possibly can). I dunno let me know what you think about that one as a possible mod user (and someone who actually reads these, wow).

Anyways all that matters is jesus christ I finally did this. I taught myself hair. From scratch.

Promised tutorial ... soon. After I maybe do nothing for a few days lol.

[clatterbane]

Most, if not all, Windows laptops dedicate one of the function keys to disabling and enabling the laptop touchpad.

TIL that this is a thing. The hard way. I was starting to think that my touchpad was just suddenly borked, but thankfully toggling that key did indeed bring it back.

To make things even better, I've had this one for over a year now. 🫠 There are still a couple more manufacturer-assigned keys up there with the brightness and volume controls, etc. bearing cryptic symbols which I haven't really wanted to poke at unnecessarily to find out what they do. Even if this is making me sound uncomfortably like my own neurotic Luddite grandmother, when impulse control has never been my strongest suit. (Though, she would honest to goodness stab at random remote control buttons and then call one of us up there to bring it back out of menus and shit.) Probably ought to look this info up, if nothing else. 🙄

The hell of it is that I'm not even aware of having touched that key anytime recently. This was another case of "run thing in emulator, lose control of the pointer"--which is not so unusual.

On this occasion, however? Terminating the process didn't bring it back. A "fuck it, I'll switch over to console and restart the mouse service" didn't either. Rebooting didn't do it, and the pointer just wasn't showing up at all when I tried booting into Windows--because why not, at that point. Then it really started looking like time to go looking for some further troubleshooting info.

Thankfully, toggling that did fix the situation immediately. And at least I will hopefully remember if that ever happens again.

[sarcasrnspasrn]

have i mentioned how my computer's haunted on blog before? well im gonna list out the hauntings of my PC

neither of the alt keys have worked for several years now (very bad for someone who regularly used adobe programs when in college lmao, but at least i could use the onscreen keyboard). they both stopped working simultaneously which makes me think there's something weird going on software-side since i highly doubt i used both of them an equal amount to the point where both of them would stop functioning at the same time. all of my other keys still work just fine

for a while the battery was expanding causing me to be unable to properly click with the mousepad, only tap to click. this was a known issue with my series of dell laptops and got solved a while back by sending it in for replacement. before i fixed it it got so bad my laptop couldn't technically shut all the way

the computer frequently forgets it can use bluetooth, wifi, or both. like. the drivers just vanish. the icons don't show up in the toolbar at all. it's fixed with a restart

internal speaker drivers have also not worked for several years now. i troubleshooted the hell out of it and it looks like the only thing that'd fix it is a fresh install of the OS. as far as im aware there's nothing wrong with the physical speakers

same with the physical camera & the camera driver not working

for a while night shift wouldn't work at all. as a result i turned it off. however for the last several months (maybe a year now?) my computer has started changing to night shift again at the time i set it to back when i had it active (10pm) unprompted. unfortunately it doesn't automatically shift out of night shift. ever. so i have to restart it to make the orange tint go away. i've just gotten used to shutting down my computer every night

this is probably more in the lines of "i need to clean dust out of my fans" but the fans are fuckin loud man

i have been meaning to do a fresh install of the OS for probably almost 3 years now. i kept not doing it because "oh i need lappytop for college" and then i'd just not do it over the break. tbh at this point i should probably just get a new laptop (like how i should get new headphones because they're reaching the point where i have to twist the wires in a specific way to hear audio anymore) but that seems like too much work