The Dragonkin build was relatively easier than the Avian one; the wing fingers were a little bit fiddly but there were only five of them as opposed to a million feathers and all one object as opposed to a million XD The tail rig was an almighty pain. Firstly, the pitchipoy script couldn’t seem to recognise the bones if I did the tail the easy way (one big bone subdivided down into a million little ones). Or if they were extruded one from another. Long winded duplicate, move along Y a bit and then connect worked (but took ages). Then I tried using bone hooks which I’ve done before but I kept stuffing something or other up and the spline would end up either moving or stretching a long way and I couldn’t seem to find the right combination of settings to make it stop sucking. Then I found this other method that uses bone envelopes which did the job I was trying to do and was a lot easier to set up (one armature modifier vs a million hook modifiers). Except that I’d made the tail too short so I made it longer. Then realised I need the end of the tail to remain stiff as in the time period I’m writing in pretty much all the Dragonkin have weaponised tails (I don’t think they all did in their early generations, but I’ll deal with that if I ever have to make a Dragonkin with a plain tail). Apparently pitchipoy didn’t like me modifying the bone chain so I had to do it again. Ergh.

Two characters also likely to get caught up in firefights but not so much on roofs and quite likely because they were following their favourite girls around (or one of their favourite girls in Dak’s case). Their appearances stayed reasonably similar though I made Dak’s hair a bit more sensible (I like long dreds so Traj had perhaps impractically long dreds given his profession) but they have undergone complete personality swaps. Traj was almost cripplingly shy around girls and a right arsehole to guys and was a bit tragic as he was madly in love with his best friend but she ended up with someone else. Dak on the other hand is confident, polyamorous and basically an arsehole because he spends a large chunk of the current block being racist.

Base dragging Avi off on another epic adventure (or just to go find the missing-because-not-yet-made D). Doing the turnaround directly before that with two characters was entertaining. This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Avi showing off its feathers to an admiring Base. Turned off the covert layers so the viewport animation would play in real time (going to have to just toggle visibility when there’s lots of characters) and left them off so it would render a bit quicker. Going to do a couple of refinement passes and decide whether I’m going to interact with them this time round or just have them fly off.

Here we have Azrael in a rare moment of happiness (no he’s not about to kill someone this time). Very quick redo of a 2010 silhouette sketch from my sketchbook. It was supposed to be coloured but the coloured version ended up being too dark so I just used the multiply, overlay and dodge brushes from David Revoy’s awesome brush set. The original will never again see the light of day unless you’re a Patreon XD (I don’t use Patreon anymore)

And this time they’re not broken XD Feather rigging took forever. I probably still haven’t done it right and I cannot for the life of me figure out how to make controllers for them (good thing I’m not aspiring to be a rigger!) but it will do for now. This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License

Because I’m failing at making proper progblogs due to having to slog through a massive backlog (which now has a severe dent in it, unfortunately I think I also made a dent in myself XD). Retopology of a chimaera in 3d Coat which I will rig in Blender and then draw over

Yes, I did it again. Who would have thought manually doing the hair guides would look better and render a lot faster. I’m also using linked duplicates for the feathers but not sure how much that’s helping if at all.

Eventually got the hang of the Rigify-Pitchipoy rig that ships with Blender. I’ll use this one instead of mine XD (I made mine with the intention to use it for animating but it was mostly to learn how to rig in Blender because I like having an idea of how to do everything, I am however not a rigger) Please excuse the odd deformations, it’s a low poly model and I didn’t fix up the (pretty good) autoskinning as the intention was to test the rig. These folded arms are much better than my last folded arms and much easier!

How I feel about a number of things at the moment, including finally working out how to usea couple of the controllers that were puzzling me.. Part of the rig test I’m currently doing. Now that I’ve worked out how it works (setup is a bit of a chore especially the umpteenth time) Rigify-Pitchipoy is awesome XD I have zero regrets fighting with the rig I had before as I did want to learn how to rig (and now know how to do a basic one) but can’t say I’m good at it. Will definitely be using this one for characters. Can really get stuck into characters and sets now I think as the rig was the last major blocker.