I've spent an accumulation of 2-5 years redoing various swathes of work (mostly in the 3d department, but there was nearly a year worth of solid script fixing as well) for this project so to say that I am well and truly over it and desperately want a massive chunk of progress is an understatement of truly epic proportions.

But guess what I'm doing again because this

happened in 3d Coat and after failing to sort it out (there were some holes that 3d Coat would fill and otherwise it simply did not know what to do with) I sent the model to Blender to patch the holes.

LOOK AT IT.

THE RAINBOW MOVES. I LOVE IT.

On Tuesday I posted this screenie of Zara in showoff pose on ko-fi

and that's where I'm still currently stuck while the next few moves work themselves out in my head.

I needed a break from technical stuff, so I started sculpting Zara.  I don't know why I always start with eyebrows, I just do, so I did the eyebrows, but then deviated from my usual of going down the nose and doing the face and bounced over to doing the ears.  Probably because hers are a bit pointy.

Today was the last day of regionals at our gym, there were three rounds of level 3s, then 11yo and I stayed to help reset the gym back to normal for training for states in ~4 weeks.

I'm feeling kind of pathetic as after guarding doors for two weekends and helping move heavy equipment everything from the back down are pretty sore (okay in hindsight it was probably stupid to lift the big p-bars by myself but I have good stances, maybe not as good as Zip's but all I had to do was lift each end in turn so the floor protectors could be put under the feet) and...apparently while I can still use my hands for typing and poking at touch screens, I can't draw.  Well I can but working on @f3nix's piece is taking way more concentration than it should.

And hopefully I'm not going to have any more backwards steps as I'm thoroughly over them!

Our club is hosting regionals so weekend just gone has been extremely busy (hence why progblog is late) and there is another one is coming up next weekend which will hopefully be not quite as busy.  With luck I'll have this week's progblog done on time, but it depends on whether we need to help set up on Friday night (as I tend to make progblogs on Friday nights, I do try to post them then as well but it can end up being sometime on the weekend if I don't finish on time.

So not a whole lot of progress this week. Red got some eyebrows:

Obviously, I haven't done uv mapping for a while.  Last time was three years ago (jeez I'm so slow aargh it's too late for me save yourselves).  So while I remembered how they worked and seem to have gotten better at actually making/unwrwapping them, I managed to completely forget what they were.  So when I was setting up the paint object, I automatically selected the largest they had available (16k), because in Krita I always paint on 16bit canvases.

My working file blew out to 1.3Gb and as I mentioned previously was eating all my ram.

And then at some stage I remembered that the uv map is a canvas.  Which meant I was working on a 16k x 16k px canvas.  Which is slightly big.  Oops.

And then the second noob mistake, I forgot to subdivide the bake object, which was why it was doing a terrible job of capturing my sculpt details.  Oops again.

I was actually intending to do this on Friday, but I was also setting up some new backup drives (my original drive was appropriated) and needed to copy the old backup from my computer (where it's currently taking up a HELL of a lot of space!) and I found out the hard way that I can't use 3d Coat and have big copy operations going at the same time because it makes my computer run out of memory.

Above is ram and swap usage with 3dC open.  Think it might have something to do with the 16k uv map I'm using.  I have 32Gb of ram.  I should probably get more.

I forgot to mention last update.  Ages ago (6 years eep) I mashed a calendar for AER.  Years later (because I always seem to notice glaring things years later, this does not bode well for whenever I finally get around to animating x_x) I suddenly realised, all the scientists in the Tranquility Calendar are guys.

They were all great and interesting people but seriously?

After looking at how erratic my steem and Patreon feeds can be, I guess I really better put in the effort to make these weekly, perhaps showing off the pathetic amount of progress I didn't make will kick me into working more harder smarter.

So as I said last update I'm going back to what I know (which is keeping the polycount as low as possible) but experimenting in a slightly different direction (I have a probably unhealthy obsession with needing all the quads to be as square as possible so I tend to end up with slightly dense meshes). 

Retopo continues at glacial speed.  We're currently at 24 438 faces, should still (hopefully) be under 100k by the time I'm done with the rest of the fingers and the wings, and Blender should be able to cope with that.  With luck I won't have to make it 100m tall for auto weight mapping to work.