RJ Ramblings

Hey everybody! 

First of all, I'm feeling quite a bit better this week than I did last week. Whatever it was my brain was doing, it finally cut it out and I'm okay right now. 

So what have I been up to this last week (aside from working on the game)? Mostly painting miniatures. A big Kickstarter that I backed like nearly 2 years ago came in this week, with a couple hundred miniatures. I hadn't really been painting at all lately, because I've been working on the game so much, but I set up a little painting station near my desk where I can paint while I'm waiting for things to render, or load, or whatever. 

I've made it a goal to paint 1 mini a day for a year. Just for fun. If you're interested in seeing my minis, you can check them out on the discord, or follow me on my Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/rjrhodeswrites/ ). 

Other than that, I've also been spending some time learning new things. Mostly AfterEffects, which I think I've pretty much got the hang of. There's a lot to learn in the program and I'm not going to try to learn everything, but I feel like I have the basics down and I could do things in it if I need to. It makes some effects easier to accomplish in my animations than trying to do everything in Daz, and just in general can make the animations look better. You'll see what I mean once the next update is out. 

Also been looking a bit more into Blender and trying to learn more about it. I think that's probably the next thing I need to study up on to improve my game, and future games that I plan on making. I'd like to eventually be able to do things like modeling and modifying models in Blender, along with Animating in Blender. Daz animation is pretty janky, and there's only so much you can do in the program to make it better. A lot of Daz games you see that have good animation actually take their characters out of Daz and into another program like Blender or iClone and animate there. That's an option that I'm looking into as well. 

My dogs have been SO ANNOYING also. We've had them for about 2 years now. Just a month or two ago we took a big step and started letting them sleep outside of their crates at night. It's gone pretty well overall, and I want to take the next step of feeding them outside of their crates as well. But they get into fights over their food every time I feed them. I try to feed them in separate rooms and they won't eat. I try to feed them in the same room, but on opposite sides and they keep running and checking on each other. It's pretty ridiculous and driving me crazy. But we're going to keep working at it. I want to be able to take down the crates permanently, because they take up so much space and I'd like to be able to use that for other things. 

Okay, that's it. Long rambling. Looking forward to getting to work today. Love ya!