Alternate title: PROGRESS.  I AM MAKING IT.

I still have no idea what the original problem was, but I did manage to work around.

And I managed to work around because painting the normal map in the paint room was hell and I also really, really wanted to solve the other problem.

Because I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, even though I realised the 3d Coat menus were contextual, I didn't really realise they were contextual.  So for a long time it didn't occur to me that I could export the sculpt mesh.  I got there eventually though, and sent it over to Blender to see if I could figure out what was wrong with it.

Couldn't find anything wrong with it (not that I'm a pro by any stretch of the imagination)  and found out I could export the model without reducing it first and reimport it into a new 3d Coat file without things crashing and burning, so I did that, imported the retopo model and then baked that.

This is primarily for my boys (14yo is currently interested in law, 10yo in marine biology).  We use Khan Academy because that was what was freely available when I started looking into homeschooling resources.

First and foremost

Everything requires basic literacy and numeracy.  So get through the high school maths on KA (start at your grade level, if it's too hard, play down, if it's too easy, play up, if you're in high school/over grade 8 and it's too hard, keep dropping til you can do it, then work back up).

I have made zero progress this week, as the entire thing was spent failing to figure out this problem never mind resolve it.

Basically what's happened is that every time I go to bake (and it doesn't seem to matter what baking option I choose, there seems to be a few), the sculpt mesh decides to do this at some point either just before the bake starts or right at the beginning somewhere:

Which results in a very messy bake:

I couldn't just fix the polyflow around the shoulders like I was intending.  I ended up redoing the entire torso and the hips, butt and connecting part of the thighs.

I don't know how well it will animate in general but it will be a lot better than how it was.  This meant the uv maps had to get redone as well.  Then I spent two days trying to figure out how to fix the mess before remembering that 3dC is supposed to be able to deal with stuff like this and looking up how to do that instead.

If it's not PvZ I've been distracted by steem, oops :S And I haven't even been wandering off my not-that-busy feed, I just have this bad habit of commenting on most of the things I upvote ^_^;

Finally finished the phoenix tattoo! Well I'm pretty sure it's finished anyway, I've dropped shadow layers on the body and the froof and after some playing around decided the wings and tail feathers don't need shadowing.

So there I was, making some excellent headway on the wings, when I broke my photo library.  Actually I'm not sure what I did  to it, I have to write August homeschool miscellany (which I will probably combine with September homeschool miscellany depending on how many photos I end up pulling out of September) and Digikam was giving me grief so I decided to import the photos with Shotwell.

That went fine til I noticed it was pulling in photos from the beginning of the year as "new" and seemed to be giving them the wrong creation dates, so I stopped that one quickly and went to finish the import with Digikam.

Which seemed to just stop on a fail (it wasn't frozen as I could still cancel the operation and use the program afterwards).

My work day got cut short due to some shenanigans (the big kids have this weird cold thing where they're awful and stuffy and letahrgic in the morning but it improves as the temperatures rise, which means school child refused to go to school and I was dropping her in late, and then there was a boring routine doctor appointment) and due to further shenanigans the day after (J had the day off and the kids decided to be stroppy including further school refusal from the kid who apparently loves school).

I am so glad it's school holidays as I seriously loathe the school run.

And the night that I'm supposed to be progblogging in, we (happily and voluntarily) stayed to help rearrange the gym as the lights are getting fixed/replaced and we needed to move everything out of the way so whoever's doing all the roofworks could put scaffolding in.

It's also comp weekend.

I'm only apologising for the late progblog out of habit as I'm not sure how many people read these things XD I've really got to kick the habit of working in the time slot that's supposed to be for writing the progblog.  It's misplaced guilt from feeling bad about not having "enough" progress from the last progblog so I try to have more to show because I've taken so long obsessing over details and making sure things are perfect.  This is why I'm never going to be able to get an industry job.

Like the most recent silliness.  The wings were uneven.

I'd been trying really hard to ignore it for ages because I don't think anyone else would notice given how the tattoo wraps around  the arm.  This proved impossible, so I redid it.

It's probably a good thing I'm fairly used to chaos, and also that we didn't actually need to fly anywhere in a hurry.

It took me four goes to get the kids' passports renewed (and this isn't even mentioning the chaos and confusion trying to tee up with my friend who agreed to be their guarantor).  Fortunately the post office I was using is less than 10min drive from my place and the lady who processes the applications is very good-natured and patient.

As per usual, it ate my art time.  I did manage to finally get all the primaries done.

Which is not nearly as entertaining or interesting as the states of the @nonameslefttouse addresses.

After ages of trying I've finally come to the conclusion that I can't make enough progress fast enough for a Patreon to be worthwhile to most people, and also there were some little niggly things that were bothering me, so I've partially shut it down (deleted my pledges to other creators and "unlaunched" my creator page but haven't deleted the account yet, I may either do that or relaunch down the line, will see what happens).

So I'm down to just ko-fi and crypto in my pathetic attempts to make money doing my thing.