Transcripts for my messy handwriting if it’s too small/too messy/all of the above: Top left: Super fast sketchy! 2 brushes rough pen (can also use fineliner) wet brushes 2 layers ~15-30min When I really want to colour the sketchy but don’t want to spend a lot of time, wet brush blends nice and quick Top right: Sketchy 2 brushes rough pen (can also use gpen or fineliner and can do nice lines) 4b pencil 2 layers 1-2hrs maybe Workable tradeoff with nice and fast

And the forever unchanging habit of failing weekly progblogs because I feel bad about not progging enough. at least this is one of the few times I have the somewhat reasonable excuse of it was silly season and January will still be my planning month because that’s been working out well so far I have been doing the hair strands in pairs which is one of the reasons why it’s been taking the better part of forever. Doing it in larger groups/rows has previously always ended badly for me. Recently I spat it and decided it’s been a while, let’s just see how we go.

Happy silly season! How’s it been? This last month has been completely flat tack, so much so there is no progblog at all and in fact barely any project prog (it’s still all hair aaaaaahhhhhhhh). I scrawled this one out way too late for Christmas and really should have tried to do a new year theme instead but this is what jumped into my head and if I don’t do what the head-universe wants it doesn’t work. Brief snippet from the twins’ childhood; Andrew doesn’t like big noisy parties and his parents love throwing big noisy parties (usually with themes). Megan figured out that if she gives him food and takes him for a walk, he doesn’t get so overwhelmed and melt down. So here they’re taking a quick break from the Christmas shenanigans and going for a quick stroll down their street to a nearby park for a few minutes before heading back into the chaos. With candy canes in this case as apparently that was what Megan found in a hurry.

I have no idea what this video clip was going for It’s one of those time periods that has been happening more and more lately, where I’ve been feeling slightly melancholy about being another one of those failures that didn’t make it and not from lack of trying.

haaaaaaaaaaaaair Now that I’ve got a hang of it, this bit is going pretty well and relatively quickly (and is also somewhat meditative at best and mind numbingly, agonisingly tedious at worst). I feel like this is probably a bit overkill but it is mostly working. The first few times I was doing test renders I couldn’t work out why the lighting was so weird and eventually cottoned on to the hairs being too thick. Once that was fixed it looked a lot better but this other problem that I have persisted and that’s a flare I don’t fully understand happening at some point in the render.

Rigify feels a lot easier to work with. Got that going faster than I’m used to, most of the fighting in the setup was not quite understanding how to set up a spline tentacle (which I’m using for the tail), for some reason I thought the entire bone chain needed to have the property set but only the root did. It currently has five middle controllers but I may need more, will have to see how prehensile we get with what I’ve got. And also making sure all the bones were in the right spot after I had to move a few things around to fit the mesh.

This was supposed to be the last July ProgBlog but comp season started (that goes for a couple of months of very intense weekends) and then I got a bad chest infection (bastard thing broke my perfect attendance record, I stormed back to work the next day though I probably shouldn’t have and it took its usual 2-3 weeks to bugger off) and then my parents came to town for a visit, so it’s now the first and possibly last August ProgBlog (because comps on days I normally project work and no other day I can sub).

I am fighting an epic battle for my life against my overwhelming desire to scrap this and try again because the topology isn’t quite right and I’m getting lumps when sculpting. I did actually have a very quick go at redoing it earlier with edge modelling rather than extrusion and ended up with a similar-but-different thing with a different problem that I couldn’t resolve so I came back to this one because while the topology of the other one was better this one was quicker and I couldn’t figure out how to resolve the problem that cropped up with the other one It looks and sculpts/adjusts fine with multires so it will work fine.

I finally finished the Dragonkin models (there was some jiggery pokery with the uv maps after I’d finished the claws) and restarted Red. It was supposed to be a simple case of append the male Dragonkin model, append all the materials I’d already done, do the horns, do the multires sculpt. It was not a simple case. I redid the shaders, backported some of the modifications made (knocking out some extraneous colour nodes and adding in some forgotten bump nodes, good thing I can run multiple Blenders) and then started working on the horns.

I was so happy when I made the female Dragonkin model as I thought I was finally done. I went to make a new file to start (re)making Red when I suddenly realised…forgot the retractable claws. Ergh. And then I realised I’d put the tail too high up the back and that the base was too thin. More ergh. I spent a few good hours sulking. Then got back into it. On the bright side there’s always dodgy looking things that crop up when modelling.