Alright, after a good night/day of sleep my adrenaline levels seem to have stabilized. I'll take the opportunity to talk a bit about what happened this last week and give more insight on the character them-self.
So like I said a few post above, I wanted to use the extended week to further polish the model and make it more presentable. And by polishing I don't mean tweaking some stuff left and right but remaking whole portions of the model from scratch. Because I'm a mad man and I hate myself. So among the redone stuff the most notable are the skirt/guard the head, the hands, the arms and the plating on the torso.
then there's the whole story about the ring. Basically, it's gone. I really didn't like the way it looked in 3D. It just ended up looking busy, messy and heavy. I guess I could have made it work given enough time but, in the end I decided it just was not worth the effort.
So I went back looking at some old drawings and concepts I doodled on sheets of paper while browsing through references. and rethought about the idea of a floating ribbon behind the back in the style of these Buddhist deities, which I like because I want to include more Asian inspirations into the design. Back then I didn't use that idea because I didn't want to use objects made of fabrics (for story reasons I only wanted materials that can withstand the test of time like metals and ceramics) Then one day suddenly I was struck with the idea of make a ribbon out of a nebula. It just fitted well with the character's concept of being the byproduct of a star and solved many problem I had at once. It's striking and eye-catching, it adds colors to the model and give a nice twist to the design, it has light, ethereal even somewhat magical properties, and it doesn't weight down the character. And with it I was more comfortable with making a more subtle and elegant background.
I really wanted to do it, but there's was a problem, I didn't know how... Modeling? sculpting? procedural? then I remembered "hey, Blender has a built-in Smoke simulation feature, let's see how it goes" and after maybe 30 minutes of scrubbing through tutorials on Youtube and a few trials and errors later, I got a smoke sim going on. I loved the results but there was a problem. turns out smoke sims can be very time consuming especially in addition to the rendering. I ran almost out of time. but thankfully I made it just barely, I just wish I had the time to make a few more renders for the detail sheet but oh well...
So that's the story of how I didn't give signs of life for more than a week and got to post my stuff just a few hours before the deadline.
edit : have a screenshot