#{technician}

With his ability to meddle with devices and fix things, Mr. Puzzles tends to be characterised in the fandom somewhat as a 'mechanic'. I do like what that aspect can offer to his relationship with WPNZ, with their robotic parallels offering ways both can care for each other ("We can fix each other", etc. etc.)

Here's the thing though:

In my eyes Mr. Puzzles is NOT a mechanic...

He's a technician.

Throughout his busy bodying and shown abilities to make or fix stuff, it has ALWAYS (from what I remember) involved electronic equipment, devices and doo-dads. It also makes more sense for me, in my eyes, for that to be the case considering his whole personality revolves around one big electronic device. He quite literally made it a part of himself, both physically and figuratively. It also reflects in his powers and other motifs (The virtual world inside his head, his electric zaps, etc.).

One of the main reasons I see that being more likely the case is because, while there's places their skills overlap, being a technician is VERY different from a mechanic. Mechanics deal with a lot of machinery and hands-on approaches with equipment that can be powered by all forms of energy (diesel, steam, air pressure, water, etc.). Being a technician, by comparison, requires a larger degree of complex knowledge and problem solving in order to make repairs, which I think Mr. Puzzles definitely has, but not necessarily in a field outside regular electronics.

Let me put it this way: if your car engine fails, you'll call a mechanic, right? Do you call that same mechanic to fix a broken TV? No! You call a technician. They are different fields of skills and abilities. Some elements sometimes overlap, sure, but I'm not trusting the car mechanic to start tinkering with my TV.

Another reason I think this is because I just take issue with the "mechanic" label for Mr. Puzzles when it comes to how he's written. For example, I've seen lot of people dismiss or diminish his inability to fix WPNZ in "A VERY Unlikely Friendship" as "bad writing". To be honest, even if he was a mechanic, he was under added pressure and time to rush his work, so that claim never really held footing for me. However, I think him being a technician would also add to why he struggled to fix WPNZ. He understands electronics first and foremost as a an electronic android.

Let's also consider WPNZ himself. He is literally made of weapons. All of which have many moving parts, elements that would require regular maintenance, oiling, cooling, cleaning and replacement. That makes him very much a mechanical android in my eyes. Puzzles meanwhile may need to replace a switchboard or wiring by comparison, but he doesn't necessarily have as many mechanical parts to himself.

Anyway, my point is, in my eyes, these two are very different types of androids, and as such, have VERY different understandings of self-care and maintenance.

I'd like to envision that if their relationship with each other blossomed, it would be through learning elements of each other's components and realising they'd need to adapt their care methods to suit each other's needs better. Mr. Puzzles requires a lot more delicate care and attention with his complex and fragile wirings, while WPNZ needs a practical approach and hard toil to keep his large moving parts working.

I can just envision them learning and developing so much for the better in that pursuit to care for each other.

May add some colour later..

Work is done on the seventh scene! Though most of it was technically already done, there were so many moving parts that it more work than anticipated to keep everything working nicely together as I completed it.

As we're getting into the home stretch, I wanted to avoid burning myself out on animation before the big final scene. So, I spent some time working on a side project, which was originally only tangentially related to HBG. It turned out to be more useful to HBG than I thought, however!

I also spent some time laying out the road map on the many projects that will need to be done for the next episode. As I covered in the last update, I have many interlinking systems I want to set up for it. At the core of it, I've made the decision to make my own rigging system, interlinking with but separate from Blender's native one. I've been using Blender for over 15 years, and in that time I have fought with the rigging system on absolutely every aspect, every step of the way. Along the way, I've tried out countless different add-ons to ameliorate it. At this point, I feel like I'm packing Band-Aids on a bleeding stump.

Geometry Nodes is amazing, though. At this point, I think I could fully substitute the native rig system with it. I'd be using the native rigs only to access some built-in animation features, and for compatibility with other rigging add-ons if needed. Any downsides to the time and energy spent would be more than made up for by the time and energy saved later.

I won't be rolling this all out at once, of course. Over the course of the next few episodes, however, I hope to get it up and going as a complete add-on. This will include the face and fur systems, procedural walk cycles, randomized animation, and physics systems--all of which will be fully randomizable for instances in crowd scenes! In addition, I'm looking to eventually make a universal transformation space and live bake attributes to properties, for totally consistent transformations that can be accessed everywhere; replace shape keys with a modular mesh system, allowing for totally different mesh counts between frames of animation; improve weight painting and deformation with a structural bone and muscle system; and supplement the animation action system with a saved list of transforms, allowing for any frame to be accessed anywhere, and for keyframes to be easily swapped across actions.

Now, back to animation. I've started work on the eighth scene. I've gotten the remaining compositing work out of the way (I forgot that I had set up compositing on layers, but not the way to combine them). There is one tricky animation to set up, and the rest is very minimal or done already. If I can't get it done by next week, at the very least it should not take very long into it.

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