It's been a few weeks.

And then I finally got around to writing this thing, and was making some half-decent progress (while chatting to sibling dearest in our inaugural hopefully weekly project chat and progressing some other stuff as well) and then had one of those infuriating semi-frequent crashes that refuses under any circumstances to be diagnosed (it's probably hardware because there is literally nothing that I am doing that can reproduce them reliably).

Some good things happened too.  I got a new graphics card, which I of course had to test out on the top of Acaedia where there's a fair bit of glass.

The scales are still going.  The only thing that's changed is that I'm now in the yellow PURPLE section! XD

I feel like I've been doing this forever.

Have I mentioned how much I didn't want to be doing this again?

On the bright side it is at least organised a lot better this time even if it's probably overkill as far as textures are concerned, and I hope it looks better, and I'm about two thirds of the way through the yellow so I'm approaching halfway?

Once again, doing a bit more work on character portraits than 3d, because my brain just doesn't want to deal with the scales.  I eventually decided to keep my character consistent with the other ones (Captain Gundry and Bricky Steve) rather than doing the different headshots (partly because I'm kind of designing the outfit and the "weapon" which isn't an actual weapon, just something she uses to beat people up with when she isn't riding around on it, on the fly and mostly because it is going to take the better part of forever if I do it that way, now at least I have some idea of when I might finish).

I'm halfway through 2/5.

There has not been a lot of progress this week, partly because I felt quite inspired by Sunday's roleplaying game and ended up working on character portraits instead,

I've always had a great respect for tattoo artists.  I may or may not have mentioned the first time I did these tattoos that that respect increased by roughly an order of magnitude because unlike me they don't have undo buttons.  And somehow can make things look good from most angles.  I'm really feeling that again.

Also despite having had to do it for this version I still don't understand how people paint from colour blocks.

Perhaps because I finally have a vague idea what I'm doing, I managed to finish the dragon a lot quicker.

I did the scars as a bump map using bpainter.  Then figured out how to string normal and bump nodes so that everything would go in nicely.

Normal map texture colour out plugs in to colour in of normal map node.  Normal socket out of normal map node plugs into normal in of bump map node.

Scar image texture colour out plugs in to height in of bump map node and alpha out plugs into strength in.  Normal out of bump node goes into normal in of another bump node if chaining more on or into normal in of the principled bsdf shader.

Alternate title: udim bulb.

That's my poor attempt at a play on words, not mapping a bulb using udims x_x

_{I definitely feel like a dim bulb at the moment.}

I borked something severely while messing around with multiple single tile 8k maps, udim tiles with and without 8k tiles, and an add-on that bakes to udim tiles in preparation for this very progblog and ended up doing fun things to the ram

The rework continues.

I finished sculpting (it was the digits that took the longest again, all 10 of them because I was working in mirror mode so the other 10 on the other side were getting done simultaneously) and baked the normal map.

The first time it was yellow apparently because I didn't use a cage.  I don't know why one was needed but apparently it was a thing that was needed so I checked that box but got it to extrapolate 1mm or 1cm (can't remember which) rather than making a cage mesh like I did with Red.  That one came out blue/purple/pinkish like it was supposed to.

Now I'm painting out the seams

I'd finished the reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeetopo by the end of the last progblog and was working on transferring the texture maps.

Only something went kind of horribly wrong and things were getting transferred oddly (I could see the shapes but they weren't where they were meant to be).  I eventually decided to just redo the sculpt and after a moment of confused panic as it's backwards to how I was starting to normally do things (sculpt, retopo, bake) and I was trying to be careful of the shape of the original mesh, when it entered my thick skull that I can just shrinkwrap the base mesh, and nuts I went.