Blender in Persia, hair cards and fire

 

Could be I've been too hasty to call this diary gone; Unexpectedly, there's suddenly stuff I can, and want, to share - that isn't as private as thoughts and emotions. Incoming explanation. 

For six or seven years I taught Blender for Warcraft art, and made Warcraft art with Blender, mostly commissions. I suck at commissions; diving into polishing the models can be a bottomless pit, and I happily fall in because I enjoy it, but it meant that even with charging around 60 euro per commission, I would be paid something like one euro per hour. That was disheartening, but when I managed to put that aside it was pure fun. More than that; it was the thing that got me out of bed in the morning. 

Not the depressed kind of 'I've nothing else to get out of bed for', but the enthusiastic, passionate kind of being hyper-focused on something both challenging and rewarding; and Blender's been managing to keep me hyper-focused since 2015. Even when bad things happened - divorce, two years of surgeries and losing all my savings to medical bills - even through those, Blender never stopped driving me, intoxicatingly, blissfully. 

But I hardly ever made stuff which was my own. I made commissions, the second-best drive there is, because once someone paid there's obligation; I made roleplay illustrations of my guild, which was the best ever - the art wasn't, but the passion of making it was among the most powerful hyper-focus experiences of my life, and lasted months on end; but stuff that's not for anyone, that doesn't interest me. To enjoy creating, I need an enthusiastic audience.

The commission stream trickled off those past two years; I've been busy with hospitals and maybe there's other reasons; perhaps the market is saturated. Life, as I wrote yesterday, finally stopped being a dramatic medical rollercoaster, the emotional debris of that settled down, then the Guy appeared and suddenly life is wonderful again. Only, I realized after two or three months of domestic bliss, I'm missing an excuse to get out of bed in the morning. If I'm not forced to do so to make lunch for the kids - he has kids, that's a whole new and unexpected can of awesome - or for him, or to spend time with someone, I'd just stay in bed. That worried me, and I couldn't settle being so happy on one hand and feeling so driveless on the other, and my attempts to force a drive to do things I usually love - study psychology, study Blender - weren't a success. This has a happy ending, I swear, and the reason I felt the need to write this post.

A few years back I helped someone with Blender. She dropped me a message not too long ago and offered a joined project. I gave it a go, but the model wasn't something I was excited about and it didn't catch on, nor did my attempts to force myself into it. She didn't give up on me, but prodded me again; finally she said something which my brain translated to 'think up your fantasy character, the one you'd write stories about or dress up if you had a doll of' and my braid felt as if it caught fire. 

That was five days ago, and I've been at it almost nonstop since. My childhood fantasies about fairies and knights faded in favour of 18th century fantasy, tropical pirates - that was part of the reason I moved to Thailand - and then, post parrot, another old aestehtic crept up on me: the fantasy, Tolkienesque Arabian Nights a-la ancient Persia, which makes me feel things, I'm not sure why. It's not the culture - I can't say I felt many positive things for pirate culture either, and I know nothing of ancient Persia - but the aesthetics makes my heart sing. It's even been this diary's title during its current incarnation, for the past year. Arabian Nights! The architecture, furniture design, thoughts of sandy desert beaches with white cities and great windows and a dry wind and the scent of jasmine and horses; I wish I could explain it better. It's a bit vague even in my mind. But I do know that, when I studied oil painting in 2004, I went to Villa Morocco and photographed my friends for reference, sprawled on embroidered divans in glittering mashrabiya lights. 

And now, finally, there's an excuse to dive into that; and I have an audience of one, that girl who's pulling me into and through this, and, along with the Persian fantasy, that's enough. I get out of bed as soon as I wake up, frantically dash through the morning rituals and rush to Blender.

*

The challenge is half the fun. Maybe even most of the fun. Yes, definitely. 

This is an entirely new area - working with non-Warcraft models, making things for them from scratch; it's all exciting, it all neccesitates learning or inventing new techniques, and it's frustrating and hard and frustrating and my brain is on blissful fire.

My first-ever card hair (the image above) looks like poop in a bucket, and took me three days of tutorial-diving and experimenting and inventing stuff that's been invented by a hundred other people, and I'm not sure it even suits the model requirements, and it's certainly not very Persian, but managing to make it feels great. It feels like my first two years of Blender, when everything was a challenge and I had nobody to ask how to do stuff; just Youtube diving, experiments and facedesking. In 2015 I figured particle hair in three days and how to make it look good within two months, but right now, for me, card hair feels harder. I missed that challenge; I had it again when I gave character animation a go, and again when I tried to make a whole complex cathedral-like building only with geometry nodes (spectacular fail), but none of those had an exciting goal. This new project does. I'm on excitement fire.

It's three in the morning. My sleep cycle is the healthiest its been in almost two dacades, because I live with three other humans and one hilarious cat, and get up, or go to sleep, at acceptable hours; but not when the muse is calling. These past few days have been the good ol' can't-stop-Blendering oh-I-don't-want-to-go-to-sleep, and I'm happy to find it happens even when one is nearing 50. Less happy, perhaps, about the sleep cycle not syncing with the other people in the house; but my most productive hours have always been 22:00-04:00. Will have to see how to balance those two needs.

So this post is about being happy - more than being happy; it's about feeling at home in my own mind again.

But this bliss is resting, for once since 2018, on a base of peaceful mind; and that's thanks to love. It's not all one needs - I've been inspired and capable of great joy and even happy without it, sometimes - but this peace, this no-stress - that's entirely up to a healthy love with a wonderful man. See? The Beatles. They knew.