And as I said "done" and took and saved the screenshot, I went and made the knees less prominent.  Roughly a month (~4 weeks) rather than one year which is much more betterer.

And now to Blender to retopo, add the tail blade (well kind of a paddle in his case) and the wing membranes, and texture and rig.  This might be the first one I do in Blender as I haven't done any more work on Twilight since finishing the subdivision.  I don't think it will mind too much.  I am being optimistic thinking everything will just fall into place nicely and work, but I am really glad I can fall back to Lightwave if things get too maddening.

Currently sitting on 348 972 tris.

I had thought maybe I shouldn't post any more 3d stuff til I got to render stage, but then I optimistically decided that some people might like seeing the build in progress, and those that don't can just ignore them til there's something pretty.

So here's a shot of the mostly completed face with the wireframe turned on so show off how well Sculptris retopos the mesh and the dynamic topography (the dense spots on the arms are accidental touches). 

It'll be pretty awful for rigging and animating but it's awesome for what I'm using it for, especially when I finally learned to mostly ignore the mesh and got comfortable with the process.

Well, the mesh borked so terribly that I figured I would probably spend about as much time fixing it as I would starting over, so I started over.

Well I was wrong.

The last version of the horns took me about 8 months all up.  I don't want to know how long I would have taken to eventually fix the mesh as I know I spent a good week or so experimenting.  Starting over this version took me...

...wait for it...

...3 days (or the equivalent thereof as long blocks of work are hard to come by).

Once upon a time I decided to pick Lojban as AR's international auxiliary language because it was not Euro-specific and hadn't been created for someone else's work of fiction (not that there's anything wrong with those things, I just wanted something international that was actually "international" and I didn't want to poach someone else's conlang that had been done for their thing, but one that was constructed just for fun/to use was okay :P).  I was also rather lazy had lots of stuff to think about and Lojban had the easiest alphabet to deal with (ascii which is not exactly "neutral" but is a standard).

Though I'm sure I'll find more things to clean up and refine while I'm doing the rest of the body.

Anyway I tried to reflect nature somewhat with some horizontal bands like what's found in kudu (what I based Red's horns off):

Horizontal banding - can't make it look twisty enough!

After spending a ridiculous 6 months on the horns (lots of chaos and confusion with the guides and my general ineptitude) this really wasn't looking twisty enough for my liking.  I couldn't work out how to sharpen the corners to make it look ike it was twisting and also discovered issues with how the horns connected to the horn crest (seeing as my Dragonkin have a horn crest instead of the horns just poking out the top of their skulls like normal horned animals.

While sculpting horns I was quite sure I was going to use Blender for all the sculpty goodness seeing as it had actually imported the mesh to begin with.  I think I'm going to have to accept the fact that my brain is never going to play nicely with Blender because even though I have been doing so much better than I ever have, I still don't understand it.

Very roughly positioned front, side and three-quarter view of the character in a window on the 21" monitor.  The actual work was being done on the Cintiq at close range.  The multiscreening is one seriously cool thing about Blender and I do miss it a little bit in Sculptris

I got stuck in "after I finish this bit" loop again when I thought about taking screenshots.

So I'm hideously slow on WiP shots.  Part of it is because I'm feeling a distinct pointlessness in them (there are many characters and whatnot to come) and most of it is simply because I keep putting off taking the screenshot when I think about it, and then eventually forget.

Every now and again though I need to remind myself I'm making progress.  Here I've hidden the wing membranes so I can see what I'm doing, and left a point highlighted so that the close up pane makes some semblance of sense.  Done some work on the arms but not a lot, none on the legs, focusing on the torso and pretty much making up the anatomy where the wings are attached as I go.

I should also resize these things properly and not let the blog do it as it doesn't do it very well.

My loving husband has told me on many occasions that I'm certifiably insane.  While not exclusively so a lot of it has to do with the whole trying to be a studio around homeschooling, webmonkeying, being the one at home so having to manage the house and all the associated miscellany.

Recently I decided to muck around with something or other (precisely what escapes me now) and while doing so I inadvertantly discovered that the rig I had built in Lightwave 8 or 9 and dragged through 10 to 11 had blown up.  Not sure what happened but it's no longer working.  I was a little peeved, but happy to discover after a bit of mucking around to find out how it works, it should only take me a few hours or at least under a week with Genoma, hopefully (allowing for numerous crashes as Genoma on Mac is buggy or at least memory leaky).

Good enough for now, I'm sure I'll fiddle with it more as I go.  Was going to post a much earlier wip and of course it was "after I fix this, and do this bit, and what the hell is that, and..." now it's mostly done.

I'm not sure if the model in my anatomy book has tiny ears, but if Red's ears look massive it's intentional, the Dragonkin inherited large pointy bat-reminiscent ears from the Chiropterans who went extinct a thousand or so years before the timeblock I'm currently working in.