Roger

Well I think I figured out a solution to my problem: extrude the parts of the chest that make up the side one more time, and then manually insert the connecting splines to close it off. Now my problem is that since I didn't build any bevels into the chest, it looks way too knife-edged. Maybe if I go back to the drawing board and bevel the corners of the shape that makes up the side, I'll get the look I am going for.

Anyone have any ideas as to how to best add depth to the sides of this chest? I extruded a shape to make up the base and walls, but have not come up with a satisfactory way to cap off the ends.

I think this hand looks a lot better. I want to refine the palm a bit more and I would like to get more of a suggestion of knuckles on the fingers, but I think this looks much better than the overly segmented looking hand from before. I have also added claws to it.

What exactly does the World Space button do? I pressed it but didn't notice anything happen.

I'm working on modifying the hand on my dragon, it looks pretty bad. I have raised parts of the back of the hand to suggest tendons, as far as the fingers go I think I need to make the knuckles less pronounced and maybe cut down on the number of spline rings that are making up the fingers. I think I have way too many right now. I'm also going to add claws to the ends of the fingers.

I think I know what I was doing wrong here, I'll play around with it, if I keep having problems I'll post an example.

Do you want them all on one plane? Select them and scale that group to 0% on the axis perpendicular to that plane. Yes, that is what I want to do. I must not have chose the correct axis to scale on. I'll see if I can post an example in a bit, need to step away from this for a sec and get some caffeine.

Fixing my dragon's feet. The toes look better and I have a bit of a nail or claw at the end. I still need to adjust the sizes of the toes relative to each other, they still look off. Big toe should probably be shorter than the middle toe, but still longer than the little toe. And I think I need to make the little toe not quite so thick. I think these are a significant improvement over the original feet, which were quite bony or segmented looking. I also need to adjust them to get more of the wedge shape that Robcat was talking about, but I think this is a promising start. Well, for the 2nd time I've done it

Hello, Have a spline ring selected and some of the points on that ring are not as even as I would like them to be. Tried selecting the whole ring and then setting Y and Z values to 0 in the Properties for the Y and Z translate values, but that doesn't seem to have done anything. Did I do something wrong? I guess it is not critical that they be perfect, I can eyeball them and get something acceptable but it seems like there should be a better way to do this.

Thank you, I was a bit nervous about posting them.

Concept art - thought I would post some. Some of these are very rough. I like the colored pencil, though. I often think that if I were doing this as 2d animation, I would use colored pencil as opposed to cel vinyl or some digital solution.

That is uncanny. I wonder if we used a similar reference image?

So I am resculpting some parts of my dragon character that I haven't been happy with, seeing as how the penguin is just about done. I've moved the legs in a little close to the body, so they're not sticking so far out to the sides, hopefully it is looking more bipedal now. Resculpting the feet to look more like talons instead of, well, whatever the heck they looked like before (they were kinda bad) I'm not quite done with the snout portion of the dragon head, haven't decided whether I want to have nostrils, a mouth that opens and closes (or just a paste-on replacement type mouth) or what. I think I may rework the hands as well, although they're not as bad as the feet.

I still need to work on the beveling for the buoy, but it is not a priority right now. As far as the mushrooms - they're not much but I'm trying to do something every day. I figured knocking out some props that could just be lathed was not a bad idea.

That might work. Strangely, when I selected all the wanted points, even though the center CP was selected, once the weighting was done the center CP was no longer selected. Not sure what happened there. I will double-check the weighting on that point. So glad this thing is coming together. I just need to check the way the torso is bending and I can start animating. Thanks for the tip about the foot controls, I added those in and hid the original foot bones, it looks better and makes more sense when posing.

Is it possible to manually add a CP when editing CP weights? Like force it to appear in the column on the left with all the other CPs that are listed? Seems like that should be possible. Or would you need to have the dev kit (or that level of knowledge) to do this?

Some mushrooms for the forest area the dragon lives in - I also need to do a few different kinds of shrubs and some trees but its a start:

So my updates have not been as frequent, but I have been making more progress. Here is the penguin character, from another thread. Ironing out some minor rigging details, need to add a few other things like proper pupils:

Well, here is the thing - in the penguing_Rigging_B vid you select the points on the left half including the hook (if you are looking at the penguin from the front). I've tried using lasso mode, I can select the same points on the right but no matter the angle I'm at that center cp always gets selected. It doesn't get selected on the back though. I can't figure out why that is. I also can't unselect that center cp. I don't think the leg will move right if I just select the other CPs without the hook.

I'm trying to select just the points that make up the right half of the spline ring where the leg starts. However, when I do that the point right in the middle that I have circled in red keeps getting selected. If I try to deselect it, I also lose the point that is directly to the right of it. Any ideas what I am doing wrong here? I need to get my weighting identical to what it is on the other side.

I opened your .PRJ file but there is no .jpg for the roto. If it is anything like this, though, what I would do is extrude along a path for the upper and lower limbs. The hand grip, if it is like this one is going to be trickier. Probably what you would want to do is place splines along the outside (trace the grip, I guess) and then extrude that up 3 or 4 times. That will give you some points to work with so that you can match the contour of the grip from the front view. The left and right sides of the grip will not have any patches, so you will need to stitch those in manually. I'm still learning myself so I'm not sure how much this helps you, but that is the way I would start. There may be a better way.

When exactly do you want to use an action? I have a bit of confusion as to when you would want to use them. I am guessing something like walk or run cycles would best be handled by an action, while blinks, winks or hand clenches could be driven by pose sliders. Am I correct in assuming that most animation you are (in general) going to want to do pose-to-pose in the choreography?

I will have to save a separate project file for experimenting with. I got the smartskin looking ok, so I may stick with that. Not sure why one side was bulging out before but I think I had mirror mode turned on. As far as the neck getting hinky, I just straightened that spline out as part of the smartskin. Finally, this is starting to make some more sense.

What is the better practice, creating a smartskin in Bones mode or in an Action? I noticed you get the option in both modes when clicking on a bone. Could being in a different mode produce different results?

Yes, CP weighting has been done. Maybe I'll try and weight these points instead of using the smartskin. While I don't think I will be having the penguin doing side bends, it would be nice to have the option.