Missed a week again, oops :S I was supposed to post on the weekend I posted the last songpic but stuff happened, just not that.

Over the last week I finally managed to finish the retopo and apparently it has 8k odd faces with the mirror modifier, more once the subd modifier gets turned on, and probably more again when I get around to applying the mirror modifier which will probably be pretty soon (after I version save XD).  I then chucked a rig in it and tried it out.

Last night was an exercise in frustration.  There was a bunch of chores to finish up, and then all I wanted to do was some art and to hopefully get the progblog knocked out before it got too late.

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 have made zero progress this week, as the entire thing was spent failing to figure out this problem never mind resolve it.

Basically what's happened is that every time I go to bake (and it doesn't seem to matter what baking option I choose, there seems to be a few), the sculpt mesh decides to do this at some point either just before the bake starts or right at the beginning somewhere:

Which results in a very messy bake:

I couldn't just fix the polyflow around the shoulders like I was intending.  I ended up redoing the entire torso and the hips, butt and connecting part of the thighs.

I don't know how well it will animate in general but it will be a lot better than how it was.  This meant the uv maps had to get redone as well.  Then I spent two days trying to figure out how to fix the mess before remembering that 3dC is supposed to be able to deal with stuff like this and looking up how to do that instead.

If it's not PvZ I've been distracted by steem, oops :S And I haven't even been wandering off my not-that-busy feed, I just have this bad habit of commenting on most of the things I upvote ^_^;

Finally finished the phoenix tattoo! Well I'm pretty sure it's finished anyway, I've dropped shadow layers on the body and the froof and after some playing around decided the wings and tail feathers don't need shadowing.