Most of this week has been taken up doing last second Christmas-related stuff that I'd forgotten (I'm pretty sure this is the first year I thought I better do a list for next year, in my defence it's the first time I've had to keep track of enough people to require a list), so work fell by the wayside a little bit.

I managed to start on the hair and rig the crest.

I shall do my utmost to keep up but this year silly season is seriously kerbstomping me x_x

And I don't think staying up late is helping that much but it feels like it is. 

We seem to be rigging all right, I did some big motions with limbs and turned her into a pretzel and here I was playing around with small expressions.

Split the panels just so I could show the non-animators among us the puppet controls and the result.

It can probably be surmised that I finished all the naily bits but I'll show them off anyway because yes.

What is this 5 weeks shenanigans.

So pretty much trying to pick up where I was before I jumped back to do more retopo.  That texture baking tool in 3dC is a lifesaver when you're inept like me x_x The skin texture is now reasonable enough for in your face shots:

And an in your face Eevee render as close as the clipping distance would let me get (I'm not even sure I have many if any extreme closeups like this):

After getting increasingly annoyed about how dense the mesh was becoming as well as general annoyance about having to do yet more rework and the fact that some things simply didn't want to stay square, I threw that idea through a brick wall and decided to just extrude the nails like I was originally planning and hope it wouldn't make a mess.

Which meant first trying to get used to the extrude tool (press enter first, then move it, then switch tools because pressing enter again doesn't drop it, I don't even remember which program that habit came from).

The nails didn't make as huge a mess as I thought they would.

Did I mention there was a lot of transitioning going on?

12yo is back homeschooling (kind of forced the issue and pulled her out as while she kept insisting til she was blue in the face that she adored school and absolutely under no circumstances wanted to quit, she refused to go due to being constantly "sick") so I've readjusted all my schedules again, and because I keep staying up late (I just work better at night!) I've stuffed up a lot of my own timing.

Alternate title: PROGRESS.  I AM MAKING IT.

I still have no idea what the original problem was, but I did manage to work around.

And I managed to work around because painting the normal map in the paint room was hell and I also really, really wanted to solve the other problem.

Because I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, even though I realised the 3d Coat menus were contextual, I didn't really realise they were contextual.  So for a long time it didn't occur to me that I could export the sculpt mesh.  I got there eventually though, and sent it over to Blender to see if I could figure out what was wrong with it.

Couldn't find anything wrong with it (not that I'm a pro by any stretch of the imagination)  and found out I could export the model without reducing it first and reimport it into a new 3d Coat file without things crashing and burning, so I did that, imported the retopo model and then baked that.

I missed two aaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Anyway.  I'm currently stuck with the dance animation because the characters didn't end up where I wanted them to be due to a severely truncated tumble run.

I originally planned for Zara to do a proper diagonal with at least a slight run-up and 4-5 tricks.  Then I had a problem of Rei's tumble run being not nearly as long because she's just learning and doesn't know nearly as many tricks as Zara, plus she does a slower and more graceful one that doesn't utilise a run up.

And if I don't do it tonight it will be late again as busy weekend is busy!

The process video wasn't done in time so it may make the next week's progblog or alternately it may never see the light of day, depending entirely on whether or not I finish Embers over the next week.  I did finish frame 3:

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).

The problem with doing 3d or animation or 3d animation (for me at least) is that the works in progress shots can be exceedingly boring.  I spent pretty much the entire streaming day yesterday finishing up the tail end of the rig test anim, and am currently letting it finish up a timing render which didn't finish overnight because I forgot to turn Avi's particles off.  Oops.