Blender's viewport is massively outdated and exceedingly laggy.  This has made trying to correct the weights on the ~300k poly model of Red agonisingly painful and take way, way longer than it should be.  I still have plans to do a proxy for animating with, but that doesn't remove the need for the actual model to work.  Apparently this will be fixed and updated later this year and from the sounds of the people who are braving it in its current bug-infested state, it will be wonderful.  I'm not waiting around for it, I'll just let it catch up to me which is highly likely.

Finally got all the stupid hair guides sorted and grouped, time for some expression testing!

Which also gives me a chance to fix weight maps.  The auto-weight mapping does a pretty decent job, but it's not perfect and touchups around the place are usually required (like for some insane reason half the innermost wing membrane was associated with the little finger why).

Add the hair in the usual fashion.

By default the hair will just sprout wherever.  To restrict it to a certain part of the mesh, create a vertex group in vertex paint mode, and then use the group you created as a density map (found at the bottom of the particle panel).

I still haven't worked out whether it's better to keep a regular update even if it's "I'm an idiot and got stuck again" or just not say anything if I'm that stuck.

So after combing the hair into the right shape, I found out a few things.

Hyenas tend to be punks or warriors or punk warriors and I was pretty tempted but nope because it's LORD Nigel, that called for a civil, classy hyena.

He may end up with ear piercings down the line.

Last week was working on pants and boots (and getting to use some fabric normals and a leather material some kind souls made available on Blendswap):

trying to wrangle the hair into several hair ties (it was supposed to be tied with a cord but I finally got it through my thick skull that it wouldn't stay, even when I did have long hair I didn't do anything interesting with it, so I'm going to claim total stupidity ignorance and too much anime on my part there!):

Currently all about hair and pants.

I did the pants first to procrastinate the hair.

Another fun one for VincentNijman, of him as a "forest fish".  Pfft who am I kidding they're all fun XD

So the keywords were "forest fish" and he also wanted his bespectacled face on it.  I'm not great at real people but gave it a shot, and also incorporated axolotl tail and feathery bits bcause that was the first thing that came to mind when we were talking about a fish that likes to go for long walks through the forest.  What we have here is a river giant Selkie, probably 2.5m tall give or take, who loves going for long walks in the jungley areas beside his river.  His eyes are better suited to underwater so he wears glasses when above.

Lame excuse: I haven't done a progblog forever because I got well and truly stuck redoing the prehensile tail rig, but I think I've fixed it now, and made it work (to some value of work) with the pitchipoy rig (the spline and its controllers are actually on their own rig, but the spline controllers are copying the location of some controllers that are on the pitchipoy rig with additional thingies to keep them from moving too far from each other, feels a bit convoluted but it works).

jedau requested an "action shot" of Aurelius.  It may have also been a pencil sketch request but I was doing so many scribbly pen coloured ones I kind of got carried away.  Oops :S

The nsfw one was actually the first one to jump into my gutter mind but after joking about it while trying to work out what kind of action shot Jed had in mind, I said I didn't think I was ready for another one yet, and turned my attention to the first one.

The basic idea was "how I met your mother" (so this scene would happen a bit before the block I'm currently working on), theme song is Owl City: Bird with a Broken Wing.