After months of being in a slump, methinks things are picking up.
Griff is now rigged in XSI and I think he's ready to animate. I had
to make some minor adjustments to the Isner rig to get it working closer
to my old rig in 3dsmax3.1, which seems silly since I got XSI so that I didn't
have to suffer with that rig anymore. But the Isner rig is much more flexible, or
at least it seems to be so far.
I also rigged Griff for MotionBuilder, but I don't know that I'll
ever use him in there. For the life of me, I can't get nice smooth transitions between
the FK and IK. I'm sure it's just me doing something wrong, but the support on the
Kaydara forum is so sporatic that even if I was to ask, I'd probably never
get an answer. If I had the money, I'd invest in their official courseware, but
I am officially broke.
The thing that makes me want to stick with the XSI rig is that it has all these
built in helpers for making the skin on the upper thighs and but slide properly,
and for making the arms twist nicely. I'm sure there's a way to get that to work
nice with the MB rig, but I'm not bright enough to figure it out. Perhaps I could
do some kinda angle deformer. I dunno.
I also have a scientist and the enemy soldiers with their proper materials
in XSI. I will rig them in a few days hopefully. Also, I reworked Griff's ship
from scratch. It's much better looking now, and I hope to do the same for some of
the other vehicles.
The real big thing is that I really worked out alot of the problems with the end
of Pistachio the Tyrant. It's also almost at 40,000 words. So much has been
added to the final two chapters to give it a much more dramatic conclusion, stuff
that takes cues from things that went on earlier in the book that I put in but had
no idea why I put them in. It's like Robert Rodriguez says about any creative
endeavor. Everything is in a closet at the back of your head, you just need to
go and get all the pieces out and put them in the right order.
Well he says something like that.
by
Elvis Deane!
