Progress report

Progress report:
Been focussing on modelling lately, as opposed to setting and rendering scenes in Poser.
Still working on lizard guy model in Wings, fiddling with bits here and there. At some point I need to make him some teeth and eyeballs or he's going to have trouble finding a lady lizard to go out with.
Going great guns with Shade. I'm really enjoying using this package and have so far produced a space gun and a rocket pack for one of my Poser characters with it. The nice thing about it is that everything I've made with it so far has come out looking clean - and the fact that you can draw shapes with it instead of box modelling really speeds up the modelling process.
Fiddled about a bit with Carrara last night. Have had it installed on my pc for months but haven't done anything with it yet.
Searching for 3d lego men to use in one of my jokey pics, came across a package on the internet called LDraw. It's fantastic - a whole software package, complete with a huge library of parts, to build 3d lego models. I get the impression that there is a big, cultish following of grown-up kids using this software and producing parts for it.
The down side: Used it to make a model, used another program to convert the resulting .dat file into .obj format, but when I tried to import it into Poser and Wings, it looked all wrong. Bits missing, leaving square-shaped holes all over the place.
The strange part - I imported the same model into Anim8or, and it looked fine. Tried exporting from Anim8or, and into Poser and Wings, and the holes appeared again.

Lizard guy

This is the model I mentioned in my previous post. Having got over the hurdle of modelling characters in Wings, I'm now being a bit more ambitious and attempting to produce a character whose mouth can be opened and whose expressions can be changed.

Ongoing stuff

Okay, my plan to post one image per week on the Animotions site hasn't quite worked out, but my intentions were good. In my defence, I have been doing other things, like learning how to use Shade, and modelling a new character in Wings. I shall post a pic as soon as is possible - at the moment Internet Explorer is refusing to display the Blogger homepage, and Mozilla doesn't allow me to upload images onto the site. (Sigh!)
With reference to a couple of Poser problems: There is a service pack for Poser 6 that deals with two very precise problems that I've had with the program - one is characters not being saved with morphs, and the other is the program refusing to save a file because it is "out of memory" and creating a blank file instead. I've lost several scenes due to the latter problem. Anyway, service pack now installed, we'll see if it makes a difference. I just sort of assumed that both problems were due to my heavy use of toon shading in Poser, but it appears that they are actually bugs.