The Dragonkin build was relatively easier than the Avian one; the wing fingers were a little bit fiddly but there were only five of them as opposed to a million feathers and all one object as opposed to a million XD

I wanted the texture to be like the viewport render, but it ended up being one glossy vaporeon.  He'll do.  Working full time on this now to get it done by the deadline.  I was doing really well til I got sick, stupid sickness XD

On the bright side, I learned a fair bit about 3d Coat and going back and forth between it and Blender.

Base dragging Avi off on another epic adventure (or just to go find the missing-because-not-yet-made D).

Doing the turnaround directly before that with two characters was entertaining.

tl;dr: bake the damn things.

After painting, from the paint room go to Textures > Texture Baking Tool

Fill in the stuff on the dialogue box as appropriate (I have no idea how correct my settings are, I tend to take a best guess with anything I don't know :P)

Avi showing off its feathers to an admiring Base.  Turned off the covert layers so the viewport animation would play in real time (going to have to just toggle visibility when there's lots of characters) and left them off so it would render a bit quicker.  Going to do a couple of refinement passes and decide whether I'm going to interact with them this time round or just have them fly off.

Downloading all the things

Add the repository for Gnome Pie Menu:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:simonschneegans/testing 
sudo apt-get update

Download helper utilities:

sudo apt-get install easystroke wmctrl xdotool gnome-pie

Download apps:

Yes, I did it again.

Who would have thought manually doing the hair guides would look better and render a lot faster.  I'm also using linked duplicates for the feathers but not sure how much that's helping if at all.

This was actually done a week or so ago, I'm currently working on the first layer of coverts.

Eventually got the hang of the Rigify-Pitchipoy rig that ships with Blender.  I'll use this one instead of mine XD

(I made mine with the intention to use it for animating but it was mostly to learn how to rig in Blender because I like having an idea of how to do everything, I am however not a rigger)

Please excuse the odd deformations, it's a low poly model and I didn't fix up the (pretty good) autoskinning as the intention was to test the rig. These folded arms are much better than my last folded arms and much easier!

Update: now with animation!

How I feel about a number of things at the moment, including finally working out how to usea couple of the controllers that were puzzling me..

Part of the rig test I'm currently doing.  Now that I've worked out how it works (setup is a bit of a chore especially the umpteenth time) Rigify-Pitchipoy is awesome XD I have zero regrets fighting with the rig I had before as I did want to learn how to rig (and now know how to do a basic one) but can't say I'm good at it.  Will definitely be using this one for characters.  Can really get stuck into characters and sets now I think as the rig was the last major blocker.

Okay so I have no excuse for sets really, I just wanted to get the rig sorted first.

Me giving Flashwing a pep talk before the race, or something.  The bird and I are actual size.

I am actually going to get this done before/by the deadline though it will be missing a few things I wanted to include.  I'm going to be reasonably happy with the effort considering I had to make a few things up on the fly (and learned a bit in the process) and had lost a large chunk of time to work on it due to needing to pull some overtime on a paid gig.