I was actually intending to do this on Friday, but I was also setting up some new backup drives (my original drive was appropriated) and needed to copy the old backup from my computer (where it's currently taking up a HELL of a lot of space!) and I found out the hard way that I can't use 3d Coat and have big copy operations going at the same time because it makes my computer run out of memory.

Above is ram and swap usage with 3dC open.  Think it might have something to do with the 16k uv map I'm using.  I have 32Gb of ram.  I should probably get more.

May was pretty quiet and boring as well.  Think we just ended up gaming most of the time (occasional bout of Skylanders with the small one, and a few rounds of Monopoly with everyone, and I think there was some Exploding Kittens in there somewhere as well).  Magic and Pokemon cards were sorted (at least by colour and type, and further sorting in the case of the Magic cards depending on how pedantic people were, I think 13yo just sorts by colour and 9yo sorts by colour and type til he gets bored).  As per usual when we're stuck home there was a lot of docos, again mostly concentrated on Horrible Histories and David Attenborough.  Very hard for other types of docos to get a look in against those.

9yo got back into making paper planes and made me this tiny little one complete with a pilot:

I forgot to mention last update.  Ages ago (6 years eep) I mashed a calendar for AER.  Years later (because I always seem to notice glaring things years later, this does not bode well for whenever I finally get around to animating x_x) I suddenly realised, all the scientists in the Tranquility Calendar are guys.

They were all great and interesting people but seriously?

After looking at how erratic my steem and Patreon feeds can be, I guess I really better put in the effort to make these weekly, perhaps showing off the pathetic amount of progress I didn't make will kick me into working more harder smarter.

So as I said last update I'm going back to what I know (which is keeping the polycount as low as possible) but experimenting in a slightly different direction (I have a probably unhealthy obsession with needing all the quads to be as square as possible so I tend to end up with slightly dense meshes). 

Retopo continues at glacial speed.  We're currently at 24 438 faces, should still (hopefully) be under 100k by the time I'm done with the rest of the fingers and the wings, and Blender should be able to cope with that.  With luck I won't have to make it 100m tall for auto weight mapping to work.

Shimmer by Fuel came up on my Spotify playlist:

These lyrics stuck out as something I figured JJ probably constantly thinks about me:

She dreams a champagne dream
Strawberry surprise
Pink linen on white paper
Lavender and cream
Fields of butterflies
Reality escapes her

- Fuel: Shimmer

He wasn't familiar with the song but when I showed him the lyrics he snickered and agreed.

We didn't do much.  There was a lot of Horrible Histories and David Attenborough documentaries on Netflix, a lot of anime, a lot of discussion of character stereotypes.  13yo went through a period of refusing to go to bed, and when confronted on why, good-naturedly joked well he is a teenager, he needs to be rebellious about something.  I suggested that the stereotypical teen rebellion thing tended to happen because the children in question felt like they had no control of their lives due to spending large chunks of their day in school, then have to give up even more time on homework, and in order to make sure they're getting the study stuff done the parents are obliged to restrict the fun stuff.  He and his siblings however had due to the style of homeschooling we do, almost all the time in the world to do as they liked, and if he felt that bedtime or something else was cramping his style then he could simply bring it up and we could have a chat about it and either tell him why it

Blender's viewport is massively outdated and exceedingly laggy.  This has made trying to correct the weights on the ~300k poly model of Red agonisingly painful and take way, way longer than it should be.  I still have plans to do a proxy for animating with, but that doesn't remove the need for the actual model to work.  Apparently this will be fixed and updated later this year and from the sounds of the people who are braving it in its current bug-infested state, it will be wonderful.  I'm not waiting around for it, I'll just let it catch up to me which is highly likely.

TubCat goes around giving unwashed humans a hard time for being not as intelligent as a tubcat, as far as I can tell.  It's generally amusing.

What was less amusing was finally getting a good result on a jpb export (had to fiddle with Krita settings again) only for my blog to do something weird with it on upload, making the colours darker.  Seeing as this was

I went with the png which worked out much better at the cost of being four times bigger.  Sigh.

Finally got all the stupid hair guides sorted and grouped, time for some expression testing!

Which also gives me a chance to fix weight maps.  The auto-weight mapping does a pretty decent job, but it's not perfect and touchups around the place are usually required (like for some insane reason half the innermost wing membrane was associated with the little finger why).

BMJ requested a springbok holding a shot glass and a rugby ball for a mascot for one of the communities he's in.  He got a bonus two because I had some fun ideas.  I wasn't going to do any shading but felt that they needed that something extra.  Haven't done cel shading for a while but it worked out better than expected, partially helped by learning how to handle the new Krita brushes.