It's moving at a frightening pace for me as I'm used to doing everything with excruciating slowness. I love bsurfaces. It is quite literally the thing that had me giving Blender a go again at that point (previously my Blender attempts were for a couple of weeks once or twice a year, end of last year was a last ditch "this thing is cool so why not let's try it again" and that's when I got it).
Cross-hatching mesh onto the face which I don't do anymore as I eventually found it quicker to just highlight edges and keep extending it rather than constantly merging points (mainly as I don't know how to merge a strip of points)
Hoping I got face loops some semblance of right, it's been a while
Amusing creepy teacup I ended up with while working on the ear
There was a stall when I had some confusion about how I was going to do the wing membranes and the tail paddle, as there were messy sticking out bits between the wing spines in the model. The options I came up with were cleaning up the wing spines and putting the membranes in during retopo, or doing the membranes in either Blender or Sculptris. The first option leaves me with ridiculous paper thin membranes which I would then either need to thicken somehow or normal map. I went back to Sculptris to add in the wing membranes.
If there is a faster way of doing wing membranes in Sculptris than trying to paint them in with the brush (brush mode is faster, clay mode makes sure the gaps are filled so things don't get too stupid) I don't know it.
Eventually I decided the process was entirely too time consuming and fronted cleanup in Blender.
It was kind of horrible but at least selecting, deleting and bridging on a >400k poly insanomesh was a lot less painful than I remember trying to adjust points etc being.
I'm sure I'm doing something catastrophically wrong seeing as I'm moving faster than I'm used to. Will see what happens when I rig test as I'm balancing "more polys to keep shape because major character" with "check yourself, it's gonna bend funny".
2560x1440 iMac screen where I keep the various perspective views
1280x800 Wacom Cintiq screen where I do most of the work. I'm about to extend down the arm. Have I mentioned that i love bsurfaces?
Once I finish retopo there's eyes to do I'll see how I go rigging in Blender. Once I get the rig (along with any modifications I need to make to the mesh to get deformations not horrendous) right I'll look into texturing and hair and then make some clothes and gear for him. Many firsts coming up.
Next character (Captain Pilot) I'm going to import the base obj and see how I go with Blender all the way through.