October oupdate

Heyo folks! 

Pictured: a small amount of the stuff I'm moving out of the workshop and into the creepy bunker storage room. Pics of 'revamped workshop' etc next update when I'm done with it all!

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It's been a wild month here. Project "catch up" continues, with a few added twists! 

[X] Black hoods
[X] Patreon drop (!!!!yes finally)
[ ] Finish workshop shuffle
[ ] Brown hoods
[ ] Light skin hoods
[ ] Resume detailed notes -> Finish suit rig

To start things off: finally mailing out the patreon drop this weekend. It's taken forfuckingever, apologies for that. Lesson learned: do not under any circumstances assume things as complicated as self-invented latex casting methods will go smoothly and pre-promise stuff. 

Some quirks to mention though:

* Hand-painting details for now. While I've resumed my friendship with the airbrush, I need to remake the stencils... and can't really do that until the workshop move is done, which will be another month or so. I'll do a writeup on the stencils later, they're deceptively tricky due to the material/process around latex casting.

* For some reason, I'm getting strange casting behavior from the light-skin-toned vat. Causes weird ripply defects. After a bunch of recasts I got a few decent ones out, but I really need to figure out whatthehell is going on here. Must be something with the rubber/pigment/additive mix. Writeup to follow once I've tested things, will swap to brown as next-in-queue while I figure it out. While annoying, I'm VERY glad I hit this before I had a full suit-scaled mix for it. Exactly what all the hood work is for. Worst case scenario, losing a hood vat is painful... but losing a suit vat would be an absolute disaster.

There'll be more drops, but I'll make sure to have the production working and stuff pre-made before next round. Both of the above need to be solved, the latter's the unpredictable one.

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There's some great stuff happening too: the workshop shuffle.

I should have been prepared, but I really wasn't - holy shit the amount of space this is freeing up. It's like a whole new workshop. I'm about halfway done moving things out, so by next update I'll have photos of the flat-out insane amount of stuff I've been able to stash in a storage room nearby. $60 a month for said room, but so worth it!

Not sure whether the new room will solve the future problem of full-body mold storage, but eh - that problem is still far off in the future. And yes, it's a revamped bomb shelter in the same building as the workshop. 200m door-to-door, so near enough to be trivially accessible, yet far enough for it to be a bit of a pain to move everything out. On the other hand, I do need the exercise... :)

This whole refurnishing adventure has three main wins for the suit project:

* I'll have space to work on the new suit rig without tetris'ing myself to death. The sheer size has been a problem before, but now... It'll be a journey still, since it's such a complex project, but this will make things a LOT easier. 

* The printers will be a lot easier to reach and work with, so the threshold for doing new designs/parts/repairs/whatever will all of a sudden be a lot lower! This will be especially important for the future, since I believe upgrading the mold tech will be needed for actual proper production. 

* I can fit in an actual media studio! Now, the win here isn't lighting/camera stuff - it's being able to have a permanently set up and easily accessible suiteria (new word!). I'll be able to rubber up more often. Fun, sure, but also needed to expand the suitworks into something long-term sustainable. Brand work, media, etc. 

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I think by now we can easily conclude that 'project catchup' will last until new years or so. Longer than I'd like, but the stubborn attempts to hurry finishing-dates for uncertain R&D-work is also why I ended up needing this catchup-time. Lessons learned... 

That said - unless the world springs another complete WTF on us soon, I reckon the suit project will finally hit the 1.0 milestone next year. We're resolving a whole slew of roadblocks right now - my time and stress, working space, mold tech issues... It's looking promising.

You know the drill - glossed over something interesting? Ping me! I'll also say it yet again - thank you all for the support. Means the world to me that I'm not the only one who wants to take these suits from fantasy to reality.