Chucking Rigging out a 13th Story Window With as Much Force as Possible.

So, Google Chrome no longer works on my laptop because my Mac OS is old.  My desktop PC, within the span of 2 weeks, has gone from dust collector to primary computer.

And consistent readers will remember my rant about wallpaper.  Thus, this:

My attempt to take adorable up to 11 while maintaining realistic proportions.

I love Photoshop CS6.

In other news, yesterday I reached an epiphany.  I am not a rigger.  I can model, UV map, and put a bone system in place -- heck, I can even paint weights if I must -- but once I reach setting up a control system for it all, it's grinding hours of frustration.  FK/IK, pole vectors, splines, face rigs, locators, handles... dislike.  Dislike it all with a passion.

And as of yesterday, I am completely ok with that.

So in light of that epiphany, here's what's going to happen.

1. I am going to make a simple skeletal rig for both Butterfly of Doom and Dripbird so I can place them in some other position than a t-pose.  Nothing more.  They will not be animated... in 3D.  (Dripbird lives in 2D now.  He's finally getting to stretch his wings.)
2. I will finish UV mapping the fossa skull.
3. I will finish coloring Butterfly of Doom, Dripbird, and the skull.
4. I will render a video each of charater/object posed on a turntable in both color and occlusion passes.
5. I will post the 3 videos and accompanying stills to my portfolio/vimeo/blog/gallery.
6. All of the above will be completed one at a time so I can get my homework done.
7. I will celebrate when all three are done, take a week off, then go model something new.  Maybe a ninja hamster.

Earworm of the Day: Elements by Lindsey Stirling because you can never have enough dub-step violin. (To be fair, it is a narrow category.  Reaching saturation would be highly unlikely.)

Hamster Humans and Hamburgers

So, I picked up this book called Animal Skulls: A Guide to North American Species by Mark Elbroch.  It's fascinating.

And that fossa skull I was working on?  Anatomically wrong on so many levels.  The most glaring flaw being the lack of a foramen magnum... which is kind of an important structure considering it's the hole for the spinal chord.

Yeah.  Kind of important.

All this just stresses the point that research should come first.

In other news, my brain was keeping me awake Saturday night wandering on "what if" tangents as it's wont to do.  I hit upon "what would my characters look like if they were human instead of rodents?"  I ended up drawing this:

Still haven't decided whether or not to color it in.

Also went out to lunch with a church group yesterday.  Epic Burger has really good turkey burgers, but I forgot to tell them to hold the pickles.  While waiting for my food, I got bored and drew this:

Pato and Lynx eating burgers.

Earworm of the Day: Changed Forever by Toby Mac. That is honestly what's stuck in my head today, and it's driving me crazy.  I can't pinpoint why, but I have a very low tolerance for Toby Mac.  Something about the background singers, or the ear-wormy-ness, or... some other factor that can't be quantified... .  Beats me.

Psychedelic Fossa

So yesterday I finally got back into the computer lab and worked more on the fossa skull I've had on the back-burner.  The modeling is completely done, save for the addition of some smoothing.

Rawr!

Also, for your enjoyment, I hunted around YouTube and found a video of a fossa.  It's kind of cute with it's big eyes and round ears.  But holy cow, that tail just goes on forever!  It's half the body-length or something.

Also finally got around to getting a UV mapping grid to work with.  Besides the pretty colors, the extra lines help flaws in the mapping to stand out better and the numbers show if the normals and/or UV's are facing the right direction.  The website I got it from has a whole bunch of these in various color schemes.  It's very nifty.

It's hard to look at, I'll admit.

This is my 3rd try on mapping that part of the skull.  I think I'm finally getting the hang of mapping organic forms.  The shapes are never going to be nice and simple, but as long as they look good.

Earworm of the Day: Mess of Me by Switchfoot.

Smattering

First, an update on the fossa skull:

jaw bone's coming along nicely

Secondly, a smattering of doodles from my sketchbook when I was bored.

The more bored I am, the more detailed the doodles.

An animation will soon be on the way (or at least it better be.  It's for a grade.)

Earworm of the Day: Louise the Lab Rat by The Living Tombstone

Update on the Fossa

It has come to my attention that "fossa" is pronounced "faux-sa" not "faw-sa", thus rendering my previous title pun invalid.

Regardless, my fossa skull now has teeth.

If it looks a little flat, it's because I haven't mirrored the geometry yet, so it's only half a skull.

Now does anyone have a good picture of what the back of a predatory animal's jaw looks like, because that would be really handy right now.

Earworm of the Day: I've had the b.g. music for Ravenwood Fair stuck in my head lately, but I'm not going to post the link.  It's just too infectiously catchy.

In-fossa-ble?

Screencap of the skull modeling setup in Maya.

I've been busily working on modeling a fossa skull.  A fossa is a predatory animal from Madagascar that might be related to the mongoose (citation Wikipedia, so I'm not 100% sure of the mongoose thing, but it's sure not a cat).

The image I got off Wikipedia looked like it was a cued up to model from.  I soon discovered it wasn't.  I had to do a slight resizing on the separate components in photoshop to ensure all angles were at the same scale.  That, And I'm reasonably sure the image is a drawing rather than a photograph, though I'm not positive.  It is inarguably in perspective, which means the image of the underside of the skull and the image of the top are hopelessly misaligned.

Thankfully the human brain is not a computer, and is therefore able to make best guesses and fudge things if need be.  And who really looks at a fossa skull that often?  (Aside from those with a zoology degree and an interest in Madagascan wildlife.)

Earworm for the day:  Hold Your Colour by Pendulum (I was coloring something very psychedelic today, so it got stuck.)