April was a bit of a blur of late nights and continued chaos.  When the budget cycle rolled around we did manage a zoo trip.  16yo refused to wake up, and 14yo, 12yo and 14yo's SO and I were literally just about to walk out of the house when the outlaws arrived with my 4yo nephew.  We told them we were just heading out to the zoo and they were welcome to come along if they wanted, so we all ended up piling back into their car and heading on over.

We used to have zoo passes so our trips to the zoo always started off with deciding what each person wanted to study and then checking out the map to work out the most efficient paths between what everyone wanted and then make up anything else in between or afterwards, so there was an automatic gravitation to the map to do this.

I managed to take care of the thing I needed to take care of.  Dealt with most of the brain post-processing yesterday but it feels like there's still some subconscious resisual doing stuff so it's probably going to occupy brain space for a little while more.  But at least it's not weighing down everything.  The progblog ended up being late again mostly because of that (could not concentrate enough even when I didn't have to deal directly with the external problems) and I figured I could get an appreciable amount done on the Sunday (today) which I'd dedicated as an art day to recover.

There's been a few sucky days and it's basically not going to improve until I can get one specific task out of the way and I'm getting seriously annoyed with the blocker.

Once done I'm not dealing with it again.

On the bright side, there has been a number of great days (if busy) because my parents are up, so everything is generally going to be great once this mess is over and done with.

_{And then with some luck I'll start making appreciable progress again x_x}

I'm finally onto the feet of the reeeeeeeeeeeeeetopo.

The problem with hands, is that I keep ending up with a Moebius strip despite my best efforts.

(this is not technically a Moebius strip, it's just the same feeling I get when you're tracing one; for the Home Edders, Moebius strips are a fun activity, get the kids to cut out a strip of paper, half-twist one end, tape the ends together and tell them to draw a line on either the inside or the outside but not both)

I'm not sure if the rererererereretopo (I have no idea anymore) is any better than the previous one.

Probably a bit hard to see the original wireframe in black under the new white wireframe.  My current problem is trying to work out how to connect the arms and if there's enough polys there.  I love the Contours tool.  I love all the tools.  Have I mentioned how much less horrible Retopoflow makes retopology XD

  That was literally what @holoz0r asked for.  I'm terrible at facial hair so...

I made a bearded dragon x_x

I think it evolved the crazy tail for prey trapping purposes.  Also tried out using the tilted pencil brush as @veryspider apparently liked using it quite a lot.  I can kind of see why but unlike some people I can't draw.

There is a snap 3 day lockdown which my parents have arrived just in time for, and my newfound problems with the snapping tool in Blender.

I'm mildly annoyed about it because I won't be able to train or go see my parents over the weekend.

I've gotten onto retopologising Zara.  I know I said I wanted to animate first but I realised when I was rigging Red that I'd stuffed up some bits in the rig so needed to rerig Zara anyway and figured I may as well retopo and rebake seeing as I have to rerig.

I spent what I could of the week and the weekend just gone (including staying up way too late which I want to get out of the habit of but I'm really feeling an insane amount of time pressure at the moment) trying to figure out how I was going to set up linked library overrides through files to have the characters set up how I want.

Because of course it wasn't straight up just linking things in and having them work, that would be too easy (and also some incredible magic under the hood but you know I had to try).

Currently my plan (to some value of "plan" is:

I would love to say things are picking up but they're really not.  Issues are abounding, some of them standard teenage ones, some of them teenage politics I thought we might have a prayer of avoiding if we avoided using the school system (very naive thought there, because to completely avoid it I guess we'd have to exist in an insular community with only mostly like-minded individuals), a lot probably stemming from the other thing even though we're trying to both ignore it and deal with it as much as possible.

The smalls had a bit of an arty month.  12yo actually sat still long enough to twine a piece of blutack around a skewer (in fairness there was some mild distraction as he was watching Youtube at the same time and just wanted to do something with his hands while doing so) and in a completely separate session also started drawing DnD item and magic cards while waiting for a box that he'd bought to arrive.

Finally fought through the painful lag and got rid of all those stupid spikies.

This is the most unconvincingly tied ponytail in the history of the known universe and my brain is spazzing between not caring anymore and freaking out because it doesn't look how I want. It's driving me to drink.

_{Not really, I just happened to have Midori and lemonade on my desk at the time.}

I am seriously tossing up between investigating something like Hair Tool and just waiting longer for the new hair system to drop.

Then I forgot how to rig hair -_-