So I've been working really hard on this 3D rigging business - this time on the spider, Sally.
It's been going slowly, but productively. The rig is almost finished - I managed to figure out how to make an IK/FK switch for her front legs, so they can also act as arms, her eyes are fully controllable. All that's really left is her mouth and blinking.

(There's a video of the IKFK around somewhere)

The plan for the blinking was to do a blendshape, because using bones would be difficult on her big, bulgy eyes. SO I had to meticulously move all of the vertices into position for all 4 of her eyes (I had to make 2 versions, one half-closed and one fully closed, so that there was a curved motion) So that took me a good couple of hours to do. And then Maya just closed. Gone.

A simple crash wouldn't be too bad, because I save regularly and could easily recover the file with only a few minutes' work to catch up on. This crash, however only seemed to happen when I tried to find the blendshape attributes. When I load the file back up again, it's as if I never did anything - even when I've emailed the half-done blendshape'd file to myself. Which isn't only weird - it's set me back a couple of days because it's happened twice!

It's a mild annoyance to say the least.


because of the time I've been spending on this project, I've been neglecting the 2D one I'm also supposed to be working on.
This is all I have to offer at the moment, an old and crappy test for a scene I'm not even doing anymore.


I do have a scene I'm allocated for, where a king throws petals out into a crowd, but TV Paint's learning curve is like a tepui (thank you UP) and I found out that I can't draw hands to scale.
I can draw hands fine (it's feet I can't draw. Feet and cars) but they always end up about 1/3 of the size they should be. So I've had to postpone the animation of this scene just to practice drawing him with his hands the right bloody size.

On a positive note, here's a cartoon I made in flash in 2004 (making me about 13)


I'd also like to show some of the doodles and life drawing I've been doing, but I haven't had the time to stop and scan stuff in. I have, however, been taking some crappy phone camera shots of a few doodles I'm happy with:

Scary, angry man


EVA suit with cool solar panels.


(On the topic of this one, I'm still waiting for Visceral to send me a copy of DS2. It's been a month, now).

That'll do for now.