Stuff went super slowly again as states happened (everything went well) and I dithered around trying to fix the feather patterning (including readjusting a lot of the feathers that got displaced and put everything else out of whack when I fixed the underlying mesh, I really should know better by now that while other people can get away with not doing things I never can) and flatten things out a little bit.

And after spending way too much time and effort on this malarky and really struggling with polydown, I revisited the idea of particle down.  The last time I tried this it didn't work out great.

Screenshot of a render because I was too lazy to save out the actual render.  Did it as a test partly because Blender is apparently slightly less likely to crash if I do renders as opposed to the viewport preview and mostly because it's been a while since I did one and I have to do one every so often to make sure things looks how they're supposed to look (the viewport render is pretty accurate but is also deliberately lower quality than even my preview renders).

I was trying to make sure that some of the skin gaps I could see weren't going to be as blatant with textures as they are in the candy shading and I think it looks mostly okay and also the chances of me ever being this close are slim.

August sucked almost but not totally completely.

I think I did peck a bit here and there but didn't really have time to sit down and actually work on anything, and even then not enough got done that I felt was worth the effort of writing about.

And then I nearly missed September too for many and varied reasons.

At one point I cracked it with the top of the wing being too pointy and went through and did the point by point modifications I'd been studiously avoiding and desperately hoping I could juust cover over with the feathers, because it didn't enter my stupid head that the feathers kind of needed to follow the underlying form. Most of that comprised of just making most of the quads more planar (grey, some of them had to stay coloured/non-planar as it's a reasonably low poly model and making the quads grey would cause the form to be lost).

New hardware!

I finally got a new cpu and logic board...and some unexpected new ram as J accidentally bought a logic board that required ddr5 ram instead of ddr4 which was what I had.

The upside of that was I got a massive upgrade (as I asked him to double the ram when he was buying new ram and he actually did) and we accumulated enough parts to put together a machine from the leftover parts for middle child.