After an epic two day battle with my phone and my computer, I am now able to show off my new shinies.

If you are new to 3d, getting stuck and having to rework things using better techniques that you figure out later is perfectly normal (unless you're a prodigy).

And if you went to some fancy school to learn stuff, experiment anyway because the stuff taught in schools is one way to do things, not the only or necessarily best way to do things.

And by "gotten away with it" I mean "finished" and by "dog" I mean "dogs and cats" XD

I've spent this entire week ironing the tail.  Also found this helpful setting

and turned it on after actually reading the tooltip while wondering what it did.  I'd been thinking it would be helpful in high poly situations like this if stuff could just be rendered when it was actually in the viewport and smarter people than me obviously thought it would be a good idea too XD

Got about this far from the end yesterday

I decided to go in a different direction and after getting past the face I reduced some polygons down the back and went onto the tail.  I'd kind of moved the base part down the back in 3dC so it was pretty much attached to the butt like it would be in a quadruped which looks more awkward in a biped but that's what they're all going to be like and their body structures are somewhat unlikely anyway.

It was a right bloody mess coming in from 3dC, I'm not even sure what happened.

That's what Blender sculpt mode feels like at the moment.

I don't know whether it's because I found some settings that make me happy or whether I finally got the polycount down to something Blender is happier with (got it down to 3.5M from 3.7M after I decided to reduce the polycount in the wing membranes using super light dabs with the clay brush and it's been jumping mostly down as I continue reworking things and Blender remeshes everything I touch) or whether something has been going on under the hood as I swear every time Manjaro does a system update there's a new version of Blender in there somewhere (this may or may not be a slight exaggeration).

What do you mean that's reminding you of a song? XD

I've been bouncing between working on the sculpt to try to have something interesting and visual for the progblog because people in general seem to prefer pretty pictures (guess it's much easier to glance, upvote and keep scrolling than actually have to read? XD), but sadly there is still a metric boatload of work nobody is ever going to see or even realise exists to get done as well.

I think I did the apple slightly too big, even if it is a little person.

This one is for elviento, who didn't ask for one but did post some adorable pictures of blue tanagers which I didn't even know existed.  I cowarded out and did a front shot (because I figured the underside of the wings will be plainer than the top because that's usually how these things seem to roll) because I won't be able to get the colours of the wings with a sketchy.

I have no real excuse for the late progblog this time.  I just forgot it was Friday yesterday and was merrily sculpting away til late.  Fixing sculpts isn't quite as fun as just making them but I definitely find it more fun than trying to work out retopo or rigging or cloth sim shenanigans.

Please excuse the slight headache that is the abrupt camera movement towards the end (and maybe don't watch it if you get motion sick easily ^_^;), I only half-arsed fixed a lot of things after changing the framerate from 24 to 60.  There are so many things I need to fix.  Including I forgot to turn the arm socks collection back on (I could have sworn I had) but I'm not rerendering this just for that, so you can instead see why she usually wears arm socks.  And just not bothering with the hair collisions after a while because this was supposed to be a thing to work out clothes rigging.  If this was an actual thing I would have obsessed over it a lot longer.

layer

Progblog is actually late because I decided to combine it with a Blender notes and it took the better part of forever x_x

Make a collider.  Some people do it by decimating a copy of the character.  I made one by my old Blender retopo method of edge modelling with mirror and shrinkwrap modifiers (which took way, way, way longer than it should have because I kept stopping, procrastinating and whining all the way through it, much like my children with the much hated bookwork) and remembered why I bought 3d Coat.  I did that rather than decimating so the collider would have no facial features aside from hints of eye sockets and a nose bump, and no digits, so it could be super low poly and the right shape (this one is not really super low as the head and hands are a bit dense).