Today was the last day of regionals at our gym, there were three rounds of level 3s, then 11yo and I stayed to help reset the gym back to normal for training for states in ~4 weeks.

I'm feeling kind of pathetic as after guarding doors for two weekends and helping move heavy equipment everything from the back down are pretty sore (okay in hindsight it was probably stupid to lift the big p-bars by myself but I have good stances, maybe not as good as Zip's but all I had to do was lift each end in turn so the floor protectors could be put under the feet) and...apparently while I can still use my hands for typing and poking at touch screens, I can't draw.  Well I can but working on @f3nix's piece is taking way more concentration than it should.

And hopefully I'm not going to have any more backwards steps as I'm thoroughly over them!

Our club is hosting regionals so weekend just gone has been extremely busy (hence why progblog is late) and there is another one is coming up next weekend which will hopefully be not quite as busy.  With luck I'll have this week's progblog done on time, but it depends on whether we need to help set up on Friday night (as I tend to make progblogs on Friday nights, I do try to post them then as well but it can end up being sometime on the weekend if I don't finish on time.

So not a whole lot of progress this week. Red got some eyebrows:

I have a cold which has managed to work its way up into my head and still quite a lot going on so I'm thinking really stupid thoughts at the moment.  Like feeling guilty for not working on websites despite the fact we're currently closing down our business so all the website work I need to do are on technonaturalist, perhaps at some stage the two freebies which are the only ones still kicking around on my server, and working with the clients' new hosting companies to get their sites transferred.  I managed to get over that after a few minutes of applying some logic to it.

And then I started feeling guilty for working on whatever it was I was working on instead of something else.  Which continued applying even as i switched projects.

BLARGH.

So somewhere in that pathetic self pity helix, I somehow managed to do the mouth cavity.

It's been an insane month and I didn't get much art done for most of it, hence the larger than usual dearth of progblogs.  For the last few months Sprat and I have been closing down our business (which for me means doing all the techy stuff of moving or helping move websites, and at some stage I have more stuffing around to do with the server and more services to cancel), went to Melbourne for a quick getaway, my car was broken into and the house hunting has not stopped (except for this weekend where there were no house inspections except for a house we'd already viewed and JJ didn't organise any other ones).

I'm still not quite done with shifting sites around but am trying to catch up with the arty stuff again (I have yet to actually achieve that).

You only need one other person for a party right? XD

I'd settled down to work on poor f3nix's avatar (poor because they've been waiting ages for it! I'm so sorry!) but there was something wrong with my hand.  Lineart was excessively slow and shaky, I kept having to redo lines constantly and despite drawing over both a sketch and having the base available (though it was broken as I had a set of bases that just wouldn't render correctly for some reason) I could not for the life of me get my hand to cooperate or certain bits to look right.

Zul'jinn had seen the water fight starting as he'd been swimming in from his wingboarding lesson with Mu'tai, and it was in full swing by the time he got to his chosen vantage point, comfortably chest deep in the pleasantly cool turquoise water.  Anyone could be easily forgiven for thinking there was a severe mismatch going on between the combatants; comprising of the whiplike Avian Saun'de with the pocket rocket half-Avian Zara perched easily on his shoulders, versus the intimidating bulk of the Dragonkin Kae'lin with the buff Damian precariously and awkwardly balanced atop his.

Obviously, I haven't done uv mapping for a while.  Last time was three years ago (jeez I'm so slow aargh it's too late for me save yourselves).  So while I remembered how they worked and seem to have gotten better at actually making/unwrwapping them, I managed to completely forget what they were.  So when I was setting up the paint object, I automatically selected the largest they had available (16k), because in Krita I always paint on 16bit canvases.

My working file blew out to 1.3Gb and as I mentioned previously was eating all my ram.

And then at some stage I remembered that the uv map is a canvas.  Which meant I was working on a 16k x 16k px canvas.  Which is slightly big.  Oops.

And then the second noob mistake, I forgot to subdivide the bake object, which was why it was doing a terrible job of capturing my sculpt details.  Oops again.

I was actually intending to do this on Friday, but I was also setting up some new backup drives (my original drive was appropriated) and needed to copy the old backup from my computer (where it's currently taking up a HELL of a lot of space!) and I found out the hard way that I can't use 3d Coat and have big copy operations going at the same time because it makes my computer run out of memory.

Above is ram and swap usage with 3dC open.  Think it might have something to do with the 16k uv map I'm using.  I have 32Gb of ram.  I should probably get more.

I forgot to mention last update.  Ages ago (6 years eep) I mashed a calendar for AER.  Years later (because I always seem to notice glaring things years later, this does not bode well for whenever I finally get around to animating x_x) I suddenly realised, all the scientists in the Tranquility Calendar are guys.

They were all great and interesting people but seriously?

After looking at how erratic my steem and Patreon feeds can be, I guess I really better put in the effort to make these weekly, perhaps showing off the pathetic amount of progress I didn't make will kick me into working more harder smarter.

So as I said last update I'm going back to what I know (which is keeping the polycount as low as possible) but experimenting in a slightly different direction (I have a probably unhealthy obsession with needing all the quads to be as square as possible so I tend to end up with slightly dense meshes). 

Retopo continues at glacial speed.  We're currently at 24 438 faces, should still (hopefully) be under 100k by the time I'm done with the rest of the fingers and the wings, and Blender should be able to cope with that.  With luck I won't have to make it 100m tall for auto weight mapping to work.