Some of yesterday and pretty much all of today I was working on an entry for Blendernation’s weekend contest. The theme was “Above the clouds”.
Eventually I put Grumpy Squirrel above the clouds, whimsically riding a balloon to the great unknown.. until the ribbon unexpectedly snaps. (Stupid squirrel! Next time use a carbon fibre ribbon!)
Rig-wise.. it’s not a great rig. For some reason I have trouble making characters with fully functional shoulders. It’s a weak spot and I want to work on it.
I did however learn a cool new Blender trick about renaming lots of armature bones lickety-split (“Select pattern…” > look for L.001 + W menu > Flip Sides in Armature editor = glee!) and how to mirror vertex groups that don’t cross the midpoint of the X axis (in Vertex Groups panel: Copy vertex group on vertgroup.L to get vertgroup.L_copy, Mirror it, then delete vertgroup.R and rename vertgroup.L_copy to vertgroup.L).
Grumpy’s far from actually animation-ready at this point but only because rigging and especially skinning takes forever to do right. Especially shoulders, for some reason.
Also I reconfirmed today that dub is superlative background music to ignore while working – at least for me it is.