I've always had a great respect for tattoo artists.  I may or may not have mentioned the first time I did these tattoos that that respect increased by roughly an order of magnitude because unlike me they don't have undo buttons.  And somehow can make things look good from most angles.  I'm really feeling that again.

Also despite having had to do it for this version I still don't understand how people paint from colour blocks.

Perhaps because I finally have a vague idea what I'm doing, I managed to finish the dragon a lot quicker.

The "scary crow captain" is supposed to have Appearance 1 (World of Darkness for ugly/unpleasant looking) but I seem to only be able to draw Appearance 2 (average) characters (as I found out as mine is supposed to be Appearance 3 and that's not going too well either).

I tried >_>

On the bright side it's not his appearance that makes him scary, it's the fact he's a stupidly high level character.

Captain Gundry is the NPC captain of a pirate airship sloop in a World of Darkness game (set in a steampunk AU).  The players have all ended up aboard his ship somehow or other (one of the friends seems to have been already on there, eldest's character was rescued from a slaver ship and then recruited, and mine was supposed to sneak aboard and stow away but as some circumstances changed drastically in the prelude which meant she had lost her reason for stowing away, has ended up just being brought aboard by the "scary crow captain" himself).

I did the scars as a bump map using bpainter.  Then figured out how to string normal and bump nodes so that everything would go in nicely.

Normal map texture colour out plugs in to colour in of normal map node.  Normal socket out of normal map node plugs into normal in of bump map node.

Scar image texture colour out plugs in to height in of bump map node and alpha out plugs into strength in.  Normal out of bump node goes into normal in of another bump node if chaining more on or into normal in of the principled bsdf shader.

Alternate title: udim bulb.

That's my poor attempt at a play on words, not mapping a bulb using udims x_x

_{I definitely feel like a dim bulb at the moment.}

I borked something severely while messing around with multiple single tile 8k maps, udim tiles with and without 8k tiles, and an add-on that bakes to udim tiles in preparation for this very progblog and ended up doing fun things to the ram

The rework continues.

I finished sculpting (it was the digits that took the longest again, all 10 of them because I was working in mirror mode so the other 10 on the other side were getting done simultaneously) and baked the normal map.

The first time it was yellow apparently because I didn't use a cage.  I don't know why one was needed but apparently it was a thing that was needed so I checked that box but got it to extrapolate 1mm or 1cm (can't remember which) rather than making a cage mesh like I did with Red.  That one came out blue/purple/pinkish like it was supposed to.

Now I'm painting out the seams

I'd finished the reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeetopo by the end of the last progblog and was working on transferring the texture maps.

Only something went kind of horribly wrong and things were getting transferred oddly (I could see the shapes but they weren't where they were meant to be).  I eventually decided to just redo the sculpt and after a moment of confused panic as it's backwards to how I was starting to normally do things (sculpt, retopo, bake) and I was trying to be careful of the shape of the original mesh, when it entered my thick skull that I can just shrinkwrap the base mesh, and nuts I went.

April was a bit of a blur of late nights and continued chaos.  When the budget cycle rolled around we did manage a zoo trip.  16yo refused to wake up, and 14yo, 12yo and 14yo's SO and I were literally just about to walk out of the house when the outlaws arrived with my 4yo nephew.  We told them we were just heading out to the zoo and they were welcome to come along if they wanted, so we all ended up piling back into their car and heading on over.

We used to have zoo passes so our trips to the zoo always started off with deciding what each person wanted to study and then checking out the map to work out the most efficient paths between what everyone wanted and then make up anything else in between or afterwards, so there was an automatic gravitation to the map to do this.

I managed to take care of the thing I needed to take care of.  Dealt with most of the brain post-processing yesterday but it feels like there's still some subconscious resisual doing stuff so it's probably going to occupy brain space for a little while more.  But at least it's not weighing down everything.  The progblog ended up being late again mostly because of that (could not concentrate enough even when I didn't have to deal directly with the external problems) and I figured I could get an appreciable amount done on the Sunday (today) which I'd dedicated as an art day to recover.

There's been a few sucky days and it's basically not going to improve until I can get one specific task out of the way and I'm getting seriously annoyed with the blocker.

Once done I'm not dealing with it again.

On the bright side, there has been a number of great days (if busy) because my parents are up, so everything is generally going to be great once this mess is over and done with.

_{And then with some luck I'll start making appreciable progress again x_x}

I'm finally onto the feet of the reeeeeeeeeeeeeetopo.

The problem with hands, is that I keep ending up with a Moebius strip despite my best efforts.

(this is not technically a Moebius strip, it's just the same feeling I get when you're tracing one; for the Home Edders, Moebius strips are a fun activity, get the kids to cut out a strip of paper, half-twist one end, tape the ends together and tell them to draw a line on either the inside or the outside but not both)