I hope all my American readers had a good Thanksgiving!

As for me, well, I'm hoping I'll be able to finish in time. I spent a few days trying to perfect the tree branches. The joints of real branches are smooth; the joints of my sculpted branches look like tubes jammed into other tubes. Which is, after all, what they are.

I believe I've figured out the problem (roughly), but the explanation is long and boring, so suffice to say I don't think it's fixable. I recreated what was happening in Blender, and only managed to fix it by doing something flat out impossible with sculpties. Insert standard whine about meshes here.

So the bad news is that the branches can't be fixed. This is also the good news, because this means that (aside from a bit of tweaking), I don't have to mess with the things anymore.

So, I've had to cut back on projects. I'd hoped that I'd be able to push myself, but it was not to be. I'm only able to work for a few (non consecutive) hours on good days, and there's just not much that I can get done in that time.

I'm focusing on my plants in the time I have. Even just doing these, I won't be able to get all that I wanted done, but what can I do about it?

For the curious, here are the trees I've got so far:



There are still things about them that I'm very unhappy with (such as how the branches join the rest of the tree), but most of these can't be avoided. I could do a much nicer -- not to mention faster -- job if we had meshes, but we don't.