Alternate title: my Blender muscles are atrophying -_-

I had a lot of work on the last three weeks and have now slowed down as I put out a call for help a couple of days ago and now waiting on a response.  In the meantime I'm slowing down back to normal and getting back into the 3d (no 3d for three weeks make bek something something).  So three weeks ago after stuffing around with the rig I eventually came to the conclusion that the topology around the hips was wrong.  After trying and failing to fix it by spinning edges, I decided to just retopo the whole thing because I wasn't sure about the loops around the face either.

It's moving at a frightening pace for me as I'm used to doing everything with excruciating slowness.  I love bsurfaces.  It is quite literally the thing that had me giving Blender a go again at that point (previously my Blender attempts were for a couple of weeks once or twice a year, end of last year was a last ditch "this thing is cool so why not let's try it again" and that's when I got it).

Cross-hatching mesh onto the face which I don't do anymore as I eventually found it quicker to just highlight edges and keep extending it rather than constantly merging points (mainly as I don't know how to merge a strip of points)

More Lightwave and Blender comparison

I was having a bad day yesterday and irritated because I couldn't figure out Blender stuff quickly (on the bright side, thanks to Lightwave I at least have an idea of what I'm looking up) and told Josh that Blender was frustrating me and it was tempting to jump back into Lightwave but I didn't want to give up yet because Blender had some stuff that Lightwave didn't have like lattice deformation.

He got that deer caught in headlights look, smiled and nodded in an exaggerated "I have exactly no idea what you're on about dear" fashion and said that was nice.

The manual showed me where the edge editing tools were, I will have a look at them later when I need them.  Still need a point resymmetrising tool.

Retopology

I used to just wreak havoc on the mesh in Lightwave whenever I needed to retopo sections, because I could.  I've never wrung something through Sculptris before.

And as I said "done" and took and saved the screenshot, I went and made the knees less prominent.  Roughly a month (~4 weeks) rather than one year which is much more betterer.

And now to Blender to retopo, add the tail blade (well kind of a paddle in his case) and the wing membranes, and texture and rig.  This might be the first one I do in Blender as I haven't done any more work on Twilight since finishing the subdivision.  I don't think it will mind too much.  I am being optimistic thinking everything will just fall into place nicely and work, but I am really glad I can fall back to Lightwave if things get too maddening.

Currently sitting on 348 972 tris.

I had thought maybe I shouldn't post any more 3d stuff til I got to render stage, but then I optimistically decided that some people might like seeing the build in progress, and those that don't can just ignore them til there's something pretty.

So here's a shot of the mostly completed face with the wireframe turned on so show off how well Sculptris retopos the mesh and the dynamic topography (the dense spots on the arms are accidental touches). 

It'll be pretty awful for rigging and animating but it's awesome for what I'm using it for, especially when I finally learned to mostly ignore the mesh and got comfortable with the process.

Well, the mesh borked so terribly that I figured I would probably spend about as much time fixing it as I would starting over, so I started over.

Well I was wrong.

The last version of the horns took me about 8 months all up.  I don't want to know how long I would have taken to eventually fix the mesh as I know I spent a good week or so experimenting.  Starting over this version took me...

...wait for it...

...3 days (or the equivalent thereof as long blocks of work are hard to come by).

Once upon a time I decided to pick Lojban as AR's international auxiliary language because it was not Euro-specific and hadn't been created for someone else's work of fiction (not that there's anything wrong with those things, I just wanted something international that was actually "international" and I didn't want to poach someone else's conlang that had been done for their thing, but one that was constructed just for fun/to use was okay :P).  I was also rather lazy had lots of stuff to think about and Lojban had the easiest alphabet to deal with (ascii which is not exactly "neutral" but is a standard).

Though I'm sure I'll find more things to clean up and refine while I'm doing the rest of the body.

Anyway I tried to reflect nature somewhat with some horizontal bands like what's found in kudu (what I based Red's horns off):

Horizontal banding - can't make it look twisty enough!

After spending a ridiculous 6 months on the horns (lots of chaos and confusion with the guides and my general ineptitude) this really wasn't looking twisty enough for my liking.  I couldn't work out how to sharpen the corners to make it look ike it was twisting and also discovered issues with how the horns connected to the horn crest (seeing as my Dragonkin have a horn crest instead of the horns just poking out the top of their skulls like normal horned animals.

While sculpting horns I was quite sure I was going to use Blender for all the sculpty goodness seeing as it had actually imported the mesh to begin with.  I think I'm going to have to accept the fact that my brain is never going to play nicely with Blender because even though I have been doing so much better than I ever have, I still don't understand it.

Very roughly positioned front, side and three-quarter view of the character in a window on the 21" monitor.  The actual work was being done on the Cintiq at close range.  The multiscreening is one seriously cool thing about Blender and I do miss it a little bit in Sculptris

I got stuck in "after I finish this bit" loop again when I thought about taking screenshots.