When I'm not finding UV mapping agonisingly quirky, I'm being frustrated by Blender's borderline unusable viewport lagginess at 2.2M polys.  There is some progress being made.  UV mapping was interesting as I couldn't figure out how to project onto part of a mesh like I've done previously in Lightwave so I ended up mapping the entire object om question.  For the shirt I just painted the whole thing and ued minimal nodes for colour and bump maps.  For the tattoos and face markings I stuffed around a hell of a lot with the skin shader and eventually got them on there but it now means I have blue freckles instead of dark brown.

This is another one of those rare instances where I post to an external site before the blog.

I haven't had a chance to set up a video thingi yet and am not willing to do it from Christmas Island (internet is tooooooooo slooooooowwwwwwww) so I am attempting to finally try to start getting over the grudge I have against Google over their mind numbingly idiotic real names policy that resulted in the nymwars (to their credit they have seemed to realise how stupid the policy was and how stupid it made them look and are now letting people call themselves whatever, and are now no longer forcing Youtube channels to be attached to G+ pages if you decide you don't actually want to use your own name, I have decided I seriously can't be bothered trying to recreate my old ryivhnn channel.

Learning how to texture in Blender.  Here we have agonisingly basic skin, lip, eye and teeth shaders (the teeth were so basic that if I'd been using Lightwave I wouldn't have bothered with nodes but Blender seems to use nodes for anything more complicated than a colour it seems, which is cool).  Should hopefully be able to build on them on a per character basis.

Rapture and armageddon and all that are upon us, and as per usual Josh has taken the kids to Tao's Auskick game and I stayed home, trained the dogs (could have gone for another 5mins on top of what I did do but I got defeated by the cold) and ripped through an Anki session with a Lojban gismu deck.  We know we're not going anywhere.

With the few precious moments of time alone, I then plugged into Lightwave for more practise on avatars before tackling AEfter Ragnarok characters.