It's been an insane month and I didn't get much art done for most of it, hence the larger than usual dearth of progblogs.  For the last few months Sprat and I have been closing down our business (which for me means doing all the techy stuff of moving or helping move websites, and at some stage I have more stuffing around to do with the server and more services to cancel), went to Melbourne for a quick getaway, my car was broken into and the house hunting has not stopped (except for this weekend where there were no house inspections except for a house we'd already viewed and JJ didn't organise any other ones).

I'm still not quite done with shifting sites around but am trying to catch up with the arty stuff again (I have yet to actually achieve that).

Lame excuse: I haven't done a progblog forever because I got well and truly stuck redoing the prehensile tail rig, but I think I've fixed it now, and made it work (to some value of work) with the pitchipoy rig (the spline and its controllers are actually on their own rig, but the spline controllers are copying the location of some controllers that are on the pitchipoy rig with additional thingies to keep them from moving too far from each other, feels a bit convoluted but it works).

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.

Starting work on my entry for The Great Pokemon Sky Race Collaboration.  I need to do another version of 3d-fyn (because the last one blew up while I was fiddling with something, probably the rig, and then I reworked Base's rig anyway) as well.  3d-fyn will be riding Flashwing (pidgeot from my Pokemon Yellow game) in mega-evolution (I think mega evolutions are kinda dumb really, however mega-pidgeot form is theoretically big enough to carry 3d-fyn otherwise we'd need an enormous pidgeot).

Build list

Every now and again I need to do a test render to show myself some progress, because laying out feathers is very tedious.  Right wing only has flight feathers, left wing has two layers of underside coverts (the second layer is incomplete) and I'll figure out how to do the downy feathers later.  In the interests of speed I set it to render only one child per strand, this one took about 15mins.  5 children per strand looks better, when I have the time and the inclination I'll compare it to 20 (which was what I was using originally before there were too many feathers) and see if the extra children is worth the jump in render time.

Particle feathers look a hell of a lot better than polygon feathers but take about a million years to render.  This frame took 50mins.  This would be why people use polygon feathers with texture maps.

...at this stage I may bite the excessive render times for the nicer appearance.

I can't remember how I came about my original calculations but I worked out that a 1.8m tall (because that's how tall my base model is, no other real reason) Avian should have a 10-12m wingspan.  Because I didn't want to make the wing arms too big (because heavy plus looked stupid past a certain point) I managed to end up with 3m long primaries.

For comparative purposes one with a 7m wingspan (made the wing arms longer but used the feathers I'd done originally, didn't zoom in for size comparison):

Reasonably weight mapped chicken wings.

Which I think looks a lot better than the Lightwave model I did five years ago (weight mapping was probably still a work in progress here or at least I hope it was, I can't remember now):

And now comes with primary, secondary and tertial flight feathers.

I was working on 3d-bek's feet when 5yo came in and observed what was on my screen.

He stared for a little bit, then leaned on my desk so he could pick up and scrutinise his own cute little foot carefully before pointing out that toes weren't square, but at least I got one right.  I told him that my base model was very square and I was fixing it up as I made my characters, and that's what I was doing right now.  He wished me luck fixing it up and trotted on his merry way.  Cutely.

And the foot is coming along nicely.  Be onto UV mapping, cloth dynamics and hair in about that order soonish.

I finally got basic modelling in Blender.

All I needed was to find where the subdivision tool was hidden.

Early days Blender and Lightwave comparison:

Layout

I prefer having a menu on my right as I use a Cintiq and find it quicker to access stuff I don't know keyboard shortcuts for (or that don't have keyboard shortcuts) if the menu is over to the right.  I can move it in preferences in Lightwave.