The Hulk ... the new supercomputer ... might have been installed before Christmas, but I'd made myself a promise (sworn an oath). I would finish the novel before I got back into art -- meaning, I would edit it right to the end; which of course means editing about eight times. I'd hoped to finish by New Year, but "stuff" happened. It often does! In fact, I got Dark is The Valley finished on about January 10th, and am now on my break before I tackle Pet Shop Dragons, the full novelization from the screen story, which spun off the short story, LOL.
So for the moment it's all about art, and I'm making inroads on an awful lot of learning which will have to be done before I can say the oars are 100% back in the water. At the moment, I'd give myself something like 40%. I'm functional in DAZ Studio 4.15, if you don't count dForce, which I've never even attempted. Must get into that soon. I'm far less happy with Affinity Photo, which was intended to replace Photoshop. It just doesn't have the tools to do what I need to do -- more of them are available in Krita, but then again, Krita is lacking a number of the tools available in Affinity. Grrr. So right now, I'm bouncing back and forth, round and round, using the Windows clipboard, and the images have a kinds of boomerang quality as they're passed into this prog, then that one, then the other one, to get even close to the functionality one had in Photoshop Elements 9, all those years ago.
But yes, art is happening. At the same time, I've commenced the cataloging and reinstallation of the 3D content I've amassed since I started in 2009, and this is a monstrous job. It'll take a month or more to get everything in and accessible. I should think, by about the end of February, I'll be as productive as I used to be, and of course the quality of the work will be vastly better, because I'm using the Generation 8 figures, by and large ... and they do make a colossal difference; as does the NVIDIA Iray engine.
Happy, happy!
