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.

Blender's viewport is massively outdated and exceedingly laggy.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.