June ProgBlog #3: I don't know either

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.

It's a bit hard to see in the above screenshot, I have x-ray turned on and if you look carefully just above the messy section you might be able to see a dark bit on the inside of the neater mesh, that's tangled mesh inside the tail.   It looks like this:

I was carefully going over with a smallish brush trying to keep some shape while remeshing the mess.

I could kind of do this in 3dC but because it doesn't handle thin areas very well and the entire tail is a thin area, quite often this would happen

and the mesh would snap.  This only happened twice in Blender when I wasn't paying attention, it was happening so regularly in 3dC it would have taken me a hell of a lot longer to do the same job on that side.

I got there eventually and cleared out the mess, and dropped under 4M which is apparently Blender's magic number as after it got under 4M I got my buttery smooth brushes back (prior to that an update to 2.83 saw my navigation responsiveness in sculpt mode vastly improve and I was pretty sure the brush had gotten worse but at the time I was well above 4M polys).

Currently I'm trying to smoothe out the tail as much as possible so it doesn't show up in my normal map, though if absolute worse comes to worse I'll just have to figure out where it is in the normal uv and smooth it out there.  Struggling a little as my brain is absolutely convinced and apparently will not be told otherwise that I should be able to cover large areas with a bigger brush and longer strokes, however the "smooth" brush actually flattens things so I keep messing up areas I've already gotten right because of my insistence that it work in a way that I think it should work when it demonstrably doesn't work that way.

I'll just keep going over the same areas til the brain accepts the way the sculpt brush works has very little in common with the way Krita brushes work.  I'm still getting the little bumps like I was getting in 3dC but they're at least smoothing out eventually which is something I was really struggling with in 3dC.

The other thing I'm struggling with is just how ridiculously long the Dragonkin tails are.

If I had any control over this thing whatsoever I'd just make it shorter.  But it's that long because I know they carry their tails like

I have no idea how long I'm going to take to do the tail.  But hopefully the rest of the body (including digits, one of my many nemeses) will be kindof easyish after this insanity (actually I'm not holding out much hope for the wing fingers and membranes, hope I'm pleasantly surprised).