Wix vs WordPress

I have just attempted to create a website for my pictures using WordPress, only to run into the same issues that I had the last time I used it.  It is terribly unintuitive, especially when compared with Wix, and even a small matter like creating a gallery for my pictures on WordPress is a headache.

Breathing Life 2

Work continues on the rigging of figures.  It has become something of an obsession now, and is beginning to eat into my bedtimes in the evening.  Which is probably a good sign.

The penguin is looking a lot healthier, as is the monkey.  Doing this is giving me fresh insight into what a time-consuming business rigging is: naming each body part, setting limits, assigning polygons to different bones, etc.  It is also teaching me a lot about the importance of good modelling.  I have discovered that my monkey's tail isn't anywhere near subdivided enough, and there is no way to fix this in the rigging process - it's just not going to bend naturally.  My only options are to start again with a modified version of the model or create a new figure for the tail and attach it to the monkey's bottom.

Piggy

My latest character-in-progress.

Rigging

I hate rigging.  It has always been the most difficult part of creating a 3d character, and something I would bend over backwards to avoid doing.  Few things are more soul-destroying than spending weeks on creating a model, UV-mapping that model, texturing that model, and then importing it into Poser's set-up room, only to find that the thing bends all wrong when you try to add bones and movement.  The biggest source of frustration is not knowing why a body part creases, bulges or distorts when you try to make it bend or twist, and not being able to find a single tutorial or forum post online that explains clearly how to remedy the issue.

Over the past week I have had another go at using Poser's setup tools to try and complete all the models that I started rigging years ago but abandoned.  Fortunately, Poser has changed its' tools to add weight-mapping, a process that highlights vertices that are affected by a bone's movement, highlighting the most affected areas in green and the least affected areas in red (or vice-versa, I can't remember which way round it is).  This makes it a lot easier to see what is going wrong when the movement is incorrect.  Also, rather than approaching rigging as a horrible-but-necessary job to be got over and done with as quickly as possible (and letting myself in for a world of exasperation when the job ends up taking much, much longer) I am trying to enjoy the process and take my time over it.  This yielding much more satisfactory results.

The theme here is "finishing", and it is something that has applied to all of my creative endeavours of the past two years.  I read recently that Stephen King had a near-fatal accident, which motivated him to accelerate work on his "Dark Tower" novels and bring them to a conclusion, realising that he didn't have all the time in the world to complete the book at a leisurely pace.  As morbid as it sounds, this awareness of one's own mortality is a strong motivator: you realise that bringing something to the point of perfection is no good if nobody ever gets to see it because you shuffle off this mortal coil before it can be released to the public.

Fishie

This week I decided to have a go at finishing rigging a fish model that I'd started rigging a while back but put on indefinite hold.  At the time I was concentrating on making simple characters, as I was sick of trying (and failing) to rig complicated biped figures with hands.  The biggest issue with this character was the face, which I didn't know how to morph (particularly the opening and closing of the mouth) because of the shape of the character.  In the end I used a magnet to make the jaw open and close.
He's now in a more serviceable state, although some post work was required on this image because the jaw is still a bit bumpy.

Breathing Life

I have purchased Anime Studio Debut as it was on sale (40% off) last week, and because 2d animation is something I've been wanting to try for a while now.  Having been bitten by the animation bug, I also had a go at using Poser's built-in animation tools last night.  I decided to start with something easy, so tried giving movement to my robot character.   It was a lot of fun.

This naturally led me to take a look at some of my other Poser characters, of which there are quite a few littering my hard drive.  My rigging skills are still very poor, and a lot of my models are incapable of being animated as things just don't move correctly.  This doesn't stop me from periodically trying again to rig the blasted things.

Animation is, however, the latest digression from the previous digression from the digression before that.  I've got into that rut again, of starting a lot of things without finishing them.  I tend to pursue something - story writing, cartoons, drawing, digital art - until I'm sick of it and then I divert into another mode of creative expression.  Now the unfinished cartoons, drawings, models etc. are starting to pile up.