Developments

I have put the coloured pencils away for the time being and embraced traditional drawing with good old grey lead pencils. So far the results have been encouraging. I previously ditched lead pencils because they didn't "grip" the paper enough, but I've recently bought a pad of paper from WH Smiths that has enough of a grain to provide the friction that I need to produce controlled lines. There are few things worse when trying to draw a picture than having one's control reduced by excessively smooth paper or excessively slippy pencils.

My evening yesterday was spent downloading models from the DAZ website. They were all models - characters, clothes, props, scenery - that I'd purchased or got free from DAZ previously but which I still have active download links for on their site. My plan is to make an ordered directory of models on my computer in order to have easily-accessible models to use as reference for pictures. I have more or less given up on using Poser to create 3d art and have fully embraced using the program as an artists' reference tool (the purpose for which Poser was originally created and for which I originally bought it before getting sidelined into producing digitally-rendered art). I've done a few pictures of characters from my Razorback story using modified Poser models, and am very happy with the resulting images, with the exception of the sole human character, who I can't draw for toffee, for some reason.

I also spent some time last night looking into an issue with one of my 3d characters. There's been quite a bit of to-ing and fro-ing with this one. A while back I sent a model of a monkey to my friend and expert rigger in the States. He produced a rig for the character, but then asked me to re-do the UV mapping for the model as the original texture map was fragmented and very un-user-friendly. This I duly did, only to get a message back saying that the material groups on the figure all now had their names prefixed with "monkey_", which caused him major difficulties in the rigging process.
I managed to find a way to change the material group names in Hexagon, but doing so appears to have completely wiped the texture mapping from the renamed material, which takes me back to square 1.