After getting increasingly annoyed about how dense the mesh was becoming as well as general annoyance about having to do yet more rework and the fact that some things simply didn't want to stay square, I threw that idea through a brick wall and decided to just extrude the nails like I was originally planning and hope it wouldn't make a mess.

Which meant first trying to get used to the extrude tool (press enter first, then move it, then switch tools because pressing enter again doesn't drop it, I don't even remember which program that habit came from).

The nails didn't make as huge a mess as I thought they would.

Comp season is one of our quieter periods and between that and juggling school transportation and crammed work days we got even less done than usual.  I was going to put together a compilation video of all the routines but some combination of my phone and computer has been giving me an inordinate amount of trouble has made getting photos and videos off it way harder than it should be in this day and age and I've given up on that for now.  That is one of the main reasons why I'm so horribly behind on hs misc.

10yo spent some pocket money on a crystal growing kit from Australian Geographic and grew it.

That's what the head is at the moment and I'm not even done.

Did I mention there was a lot of transitioning going on?

12yo is back homeschooling (kind of forced the issue and pulled her out as while she kept insisting til she was blue in the face that she adored school and absolutely under no circumstances wanted to quit, she refused to go due to being constantly "sick") so I've readjusted all my schedules again, and because I keep staying up late (I just work better at night!) I've stuffed up a lot of my own timing.

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).