I’ve created a new character named Taerdu that will replace a secondary character (and his entire species) in the short.  I felt that his design was superior to the old concept of the Maudool character and his species.

I’m also going to use the old Toki model in place of the Alexander character.  When Toki was made, he was going to have his own short, but I gave up on it.  Earlier in this project I had intended to make the Alexander character similar to Toki as a nod to my favorite character.  Now I’m just going to use Toki himself.  He’ll be modified and given clothes and glasses to fit the part, and I’m going to improve his old messy rig.  There will be some improvements for Cable as well, but nothing too in depth.

I threw out the remake of Cable’s model.  The idea was that I modeled him to show off and not to animate, so he was too detailed or some stupid reason like that.  The reality is I have no trouble animating him, the old one looks better, it wasn’t that hard to model to begin with, and that level of texturing won’t be as hard as it was now that I have 3D Coat.  Couple that with my removal of “lighting” from my progress talley of scene one and the scene’s Excel progress bar shot from 23 to 42%.

But I was supposed to finish scene one tomorrow, so I’m still behind.  I think my enthusasm for this project took a hit when I tried to remake it less good.  (aka, “remake something perfectly fine for no real reason”).

So, compare:

to this:

I spared no expense to make the character look as good as I could make it, that’s how it should be, and that’s how I’ll continue from here on out. I’m not on a budget, and I have all the time in the world.

I wrote a 3D Coat tutorial for Blender users because at the moment 3DCoat is very complicated. It’s easy to do something wrong that you’ll regret later, but it’s otherwise a great program, and a great alternative to zBrush.  Click the image to continue on to the tutorial, and if you have comments or critiques about it, feel free to send an email!

If you’ve been reading my site for the past few months or so, I bet you’re wondering where I am with the project “Cable and the Inferno”. Well you’re in luck, because I can tell you exactly where I am. I have been using Microsoft Excel and Planner 0.14 to track progress with my film. Because I’ve split the project up into sub projects based on scenes, tracking progress is a lot easier. Additionally, I can show you the first scene when I finish it, rather than showing you a bunch of incomplete work if I had chosen to tackle it all at once.

So far I am 15% complete with the first scene. The reason it has taken me so long is because I chose to remodel Cable from the ground up (to be easier to animate and match quality with other characters), and I had a ship model half way finished before I changed my mind and went with another design. I learned not to start modeling after only one or two drawings. If your heart’s not in it, you’ll be uncertain and waste time.

The latest incarnation of the old Anim8or.org forum has launched as CG-Nation. CG-Nation is open to all computer graphics artists, and is non software specific. We have CG News, Discussions, Challenges, and more!

Check in, and check it out!