At long last, Rose has actual fur!!! (You would not believe how hard that was to set up, or how many approaches I tried before I settled on this one.)

Not visible in this image is all the work that's gone into Rose's leg rig. Also not visible is the automatic walk cycle I've set up. A lot of work went into both of those, too.

Apart from that, I've also been working on things for other characters. In the past, you may have noticed that crowd scenes were pretty stiff and repetitive. That's because my computer could only really handle having two or three base rigs and models set up in a scene to draw the crowd from--and only two or three animations, accordingly. However, I've now figured out a system that would let me offset and mix and match multiple animations for every individual member of a crowd! I have some other ideas that would add even more dynamism, too....

Over the weekend, I'll try to finish up Rose's automatic walk cycle. Then, it'll be time to integrate all the rig parts and tidy them up. And then, at last, it will be time to move on to another model.

I can't promise the rest of the models will be done in a timely manner. The work on improving Rose has also opened up a lot of ways to improve the others, in a way that will make HBG look dramatically better, as well as make it easier to animate. I can guarantee it's going to take more than a month, maybe two. Fortunately, I'll be having help on background work and animation to help balance out the rest of the workload. I'm going to say this will be at least another 4-5 months of work, for a June or July release. I hope you'll agree that it will be worth it. Until next time!