Sketch: More Bunny Egg

I've got round 1 of the materials finished.

You might notice the embroidery isn't as shiny on the new one (on your right) as the old.  That's intentional.  I was never quite happy with how it came out the first time.  I'll work on it some more, but first I want to gamma correct the materials.  Gamma Correction is the coolest discovery to hit Poserdom since MAT poses.  It's absence is responsible for the infamous distinctive "Poser murk".  As it turns out, a lot of the data Poser's rendering engine is outputting doesn't display correctly on a monitor.  Hell of an oversight there. :P  You can correct some of that in post, but what I've seen so far, having the engine do it (Poser Pro 2010) or doing it in materials gives results I like better.  It's the engineer in me; I rather get good data directly than massage bad data to something workable.

Oh, the feet there? Same deal as the ears; the soles are part of the same material zone as the legs.  I'm so proud of those, because that is three materials mixed together.  (33 nodes, if anyone's counting.  But I suspect some of those can be optimized out.)

It wasn't necessarily picked for this reason, but this project is actually a great one for learning the Matmatic compiler.  It touches on tons of the main concepts.  Once I finish him, I'll probably try to spend more time learning Python programming full out.  I want to learn it for other reasons, and it'll only help me with the shader building.

Excited nerd sketch

I'm working on rebuilding and improving the shaders* for the little Pysanky bunny-egg thing I did at Easter.  So far I've got the ears.




So why am I excited about the ears?  After all, they look basically the same.  Well, let me do some isoteric babbling that most people won't understand.  There's an important difference here.  The model on the left, I remapped so that the inner ear could be a different material than the outer ear.  On the model on the right, that's all done with a single shader that contains both the satin and the velvet.  It takes 9 extra nodes to do it just for this relatively simple case and would be more or less insane to assemble in Poser itself.

Luckily, someone built a compiler that lets you write materials in Python code, and then translates them into Poser nodes.  I'm working on learning it, and trying to learn shaders as well.  It allows you to combine separate materials into a single shader fairly easily, which will be even cooler for more complex situations.


* Properly speaking, they're actually materials.  Shaders are the pre-existing nodes they're built out of.  But that gets confused with the laymen definition of material, which would view the satin and the velvet separately.

(It's Ukrainian.  I looked it up.) 
(OK, I'm taking the internet's word for it that this means "Happy Easter".    It could actually be something really rude for all I know.)

As an extra Easter gift, here are some "tubes" (actually PNGs with transparent backgrounds) of the little bunny egg: the above image, one with the bunny-egg sitting, and one with him standing.  Enjoy!

Download Pysanky Bunny Pics



Pysanky Bunny Tubes 1 by Jinnayah is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Sketch!

You sketch your way, and I'll sketch mine:

I'm working on a pysanka texture for this little guy, and these are my base materials.  I especially like how the velvet has come out, but I'm worried about how to light the egg part.  It is not going to take much to blow those highlights out.

Let the cursing begin.

Gauge swatches are lying bastards.
I did a gauge swatch for the Wonderful Wallaby sweater I started on New Years.  I did.
I think I may have done it in Magic Loop, not realizing I knit more tightly when Magic Looping than when knitting on needles normally.

In any event, my sweater that was supposed to be 43 1/2 " around the bust, about the size of the largest commercial hoody I find comfortable.  It's actually going to end up 46 1/2" around the bust -- much too big.

My options are to frog an entire month's work, or work another month for a sweater that will never fit right and so rarely if ever be worn.

The choice seems obvious to me.  Frogging it is.  :P  Suck!

While I'm at it, I think I'll change the various garter edgings to seed stitch.  I like the look somewhat better.

I'm going to have to figure out how to compensate for a larger upper arm diameter, too.  I want more ease there than the pattern allows.

Gosh, this is frustrating.

I think I'll frog the sleeves back to the ribbing, and do them first before redoing the body of the sweater.  I'm not enjoying knitting them, so I can get it out of the way, and the ribbing is OK to a bit large already so I don't have to start completely from scratch.  Mostly, but not completely.

I mentioned suck, right?

I haz a sad.

The alpaca yarn I was going to knit into an Ishbel?  Yeah, something about it is causing allergy-like symptoms.  I'm thinking maybe I'm allergic to some of the VM in it.  Whatever it is, though, I start working with it and my eyes start watering in a matter of seconds.  First time I hoped was a fluke, but the second time in a completely different environment?  Nope, we're talking irritant.  Not gonna keep going with that

Sigh.

Guess I'll wait until my Thursday knit night, have the yarn shop wind a skein of Cascade alpaca lace I bought a while ago, and buy a size 3 needle while I'm there.

Started my Ishbel

I balled up my special alpaca yarn and started my Ishbel scarf.  Let me tell you, though, I was threatening to confiscate the skeiner of the person who wound that hank.  Messiest skein I personally have unwound.  It doesn't help that the stuff is full of sticky grabby vegetable matter, either.

When I started knitting, my eyes started to water and get that "puffed up" feeling, so I'm a little afraid I may be allergic to something about it.  I doubt it's the alpaca itself -- alpaca is considered hypoallergenic -- but it may be the VM is something I'm allergic to, or something used in the processing.  Or it may be throwing off dust and fuzz as I'm working, and it's more an irritation than an allergy thing.  It did seem to clear up as I work, so we'll see if it gets better or if I have to bail and pass this skein on to someone else.

Suddenly developing an alpaca allergy would be utter cruelty on the part of the universe.  I hate to say it, but if that were to happen, I'd go back to wool and the cat's on her own.  (Well, you know, with the meds to help.)

I started this thing with US5 needles, but that was way too loose, so I switched down to 3mm (European size, between a US2 and a US3.)  If you're wondering the method to my madness, those happen to be the sizes of Addi Lace needles I own.  Going up a size from the 3 mm would probably be better, but not enough to wait until Thursday when I get back to the yarn shop.  The 3mm is giving a pretty nice fabric and should block out OK, but I think I will be a bit below gauge even blocked.  (Yes, I'm a bad girl who didn't do a gauge swatch.  It's a flippin' scarf.)  I was already thinking of doing the larger stockinette section from the shawl but stay with the narrower border of the scarf to get a little more size out of it.

I thought on it some more.

The lace + locally produced alpaca thing.  What I've gone and done is bought myself a copy of the Ishbel shawl.  It seems all the time someone in one of my Ravelry groups is sharing one they've done, and I click on their thumbnail going "ooh, pretty, what's that?" and it's the Ishbel.  My 540 yards should be more than enough to make a nice triangular scarf.  Because it starts with a good chunk of stockinette stitch, by the time the growth function gets intimidating I'll be well committed, and even on the big size the last row isn't that big.  As an extra bonus 80% of the purchase price goes to Doctors Without Borders to help in Haiti. :)

I hate it when this happens.

Although I guess I hate when this doesn't happen even more.

This afternoon I was really jonesing to ball up some locally-produced alpaca laceweight I have and start a Swallowtail Shawl.  So this evening I brought up the Ravelry page to see if there was an easy download location, since I'm not exactly sure where I stored my copy.  And suddenly it hit me: I don't really like the Swallowtail Shawl.

Don't get me wrong, it's a lovely shawl.  I just don't care for it.  I'm not very fond of the leaf pattern that makes up the body, and the transitions from body to border and border to edging are a bit abrupt for my tastes.

I'm glad I realized this before knitting several tens of thousands of stitches into the thing.  But, now what do I do with 540 yards of locally-produced alpaca laceweight?

Guess that'll live in the stash for a while.

I'm still kind of jonesing to knit some lace, though.  But not the Alka shawl I've got started.  I'm barely into it, and each row already takes 1/2 hour to do, and it's a top-down faroese so it's one of those shawls with a growth function that just gets worse and worse.

I'm thinking maybe a Frost Flowers and Leaves shawl or a Cap shawl (both Ravelry links; you'll only be able to see if you have an account, I'm afraid), but both are knit from the center out, and the Alka has me a little gun shy about those growth functions in laceweight.

I'll have to think on it some more.