Sprat is up for a couple of weeks, so I've been a bit distracted.

On Friday when I was supposed to have been writing this, we played Minecraft for most of the day.  I used to play survival mode with the kids, but these days I just mindlessly build things in random locations (usually with plenty of supplies inside) for Sprat and the kids to find (they're all in survival mode), and laugh at the hilarious sound effects that happen when they encounter the hostile mobs.

And at Sprat who while trying to go to some mine 12yo had found, pretty much ended up everywhere including where I was building (I thought I'd flown far enough that it would take them a while to find me) but where she wanted to be.  Apparently she's amazing at finding everything except what she's looking for.

Finally finished the gloss map for the scales! The belly scales were fairly boring and straightforwrd but I was still glad to be done with  them XD Currently lighting the froof and am much happier as I like doing hair.  Quite pleased with how it's turning out so far too.

Finally finished the tiny tail scales! My hands!

As I mentioned in the shenanigans comic (where this image first appeared), the pink was so glossy that I had to switch to the gloss map to finish up the tail as it was in a bit of an awkward spot in the light and using the uniform lighting made it too glossy and the pbr lighting couldn't pick up the glossiness because the mesh was in the way.

White is no gloss, not-white will have some degree of gloss depending on how black it is.

It's coming up looking pretty nice.

See what I have to put up with?

See what my poor family have to put up with? XD

I'm having scale issues in both senses of the word. For whatever reason, when importing a model from Blender, it's microscopic in 3dC.  What I did with Red was to just enlarge the model til it was big enough to work on, then send it back, where it was (strangely) way, way, way too big in Blender (I think he was close to 1km high before I resized him).  Then it didn't help that the vertices were apparently somehow too close together for the auto weight mapping so I had to enlarge it again just enough for that to work (because manually weight mapping rigs from the outset is the definition of tedious) and then shrink it agan. 

It's actually an upward spiral (dragon is pointing upwards) but I'm working from the head down therefore it's a downward spiral :D

Scales here are shown with the pbr lighting that I switched to as I'm now in the pink section (last section yay!) and the uniform lighting made the glossiness blinding.  I've had to switch depending on the colour or where I was, needed the uniform lighting for under the arm for example. 

Galen was totally going to be a bounty hunter or special forces sniper or something to that effect.  I even did the sketchy for it.  It wasn't happy though, and it was late at night so I deleted everything and stormed off to bed.

This Galen is a prepper who lives a simple peaceful life on the edge of town and is one of those guys you want to take on your long range hunting trips because he has a keen eye.  Also probably has an armoured campervan a family could survive a zombie apocalypse in.

The lighting for this one is a bit weird because he was meant to be stargazing but this method of shading is not conducive to night lighting (can be done but it's supposed to be a QUICK method of shading and doing that much deep shadow is the opposite of quick) so I changed it in a hurry to late evening cloud gazing.

Cloth dynamics is forever my sworn enemy.

I was kind of referring to a scene in Ponyo but it's been so long I can't even remember if that's what she actually says, I have a feeling that it may have been "I want legs" and in true fyn style I am much too lazy busy to see if there's a clip on Youtube.

Anyway, I do have legs.  Well, about 3.5 legs.

Finally got into the green section!

The one and only downside to this is that the next section is the blue section and with it more legs.

By necessity we ended term 1 pretty quietly with the Scitech homeschooling lessons.  Occasionally one or both boys missed some lessons due to colds, which I didn't realise at the time was a taste of things to come.

After one of the lessons both of them got to, 10yo decided to blow some pocket money at the Scitech shop on some compound eye glasses.  There was some hilarity when both of them had a go with it the first time.

One of the last two lessons involved programming an extremely basic AI to win an extremely basic game, and the paperwork task was to graph the robot's wins.

Those tiny little leg scales are very fiddly and I have three and a half more legs and then pretty much the entire tail section still to go x_x

The body scales are a lot easier!