Contortionist.

Well, the new rig works- but there is a major amount of weight painting to do again. Another unfortunate side effect of this is that the hair needs to be redone, and a solution found for the deforming buttons.

Rebuilt The Entire Skeleton.

Because bones are not happy when they are their own grandparents, I scrapped the whole rig and started over.

I still have no idea why why I copy a pose reversed, it does not mirror in the expected way.

Oh well, the skeleton seems happy enough.

Facial Rig

There are some very serious bone weight issues going on, so I will probably have to delete all the weights and start over with defining influences, but I was able to proof-of-concept my rig by making this smug expression here.

Meanwhile, here's a horrific illustration of why I still have a lot of damage to repair:

Crimes Against Fashion

Started out with an ugly spider-monster looking thing (above), but the final result looks ok (below).

As I look at him, I am considering adding more buttons up both sides of his coat.

Here's a bit of a flyaround:

Hair and Bling.

Uncanny Valley

Coming along..

I created some eyes using a pretty good tutorial found here:

http://vimeo.com/groups/10834/videos/2830890

The technique involves creating a modeled geometric iris inside of the eye and using transparent, blended textures with an alpha channel to gently reveal it.

The tutorial doesn't seem to use the same set of defaults for material settings that my Blender setup does, so getting it to work was way more trouble than I expected. I think results are pretty nice, however.

I haven't decided if I am going to use this to bake a low-poly version for use in a game or not. I'm just enjoying the modeling process and seeing where that takes me.

Still to do: Hair and eyebrows, a medal for his chest, more believable texture on his jacket and skin. Hopefully, I'll be on to rigging him up for animation in the next couple days.

Big Hat is Big

Makin Some Clothes and Fingers

Almost ready to make the absolutely gigantic hat.

Napoleon: Freaky Cupie Doll Edition

Made his freaky head, but I'm sure it will look much less freaky once I get some pupils, hair, eyebrows, and his iconic hat. Starting on the uniform now.

There is always more tweaking to do and I'm not yet satisfied with the overall look of this guy yet, but the practice is paying off and this is some of the best topology I've done yet- good flowing of edge loops around key features that will ensure clean deforming.