10yo: can I do memrise?
Me: no. Go to sleep.
10yo: por favor?
Me: no. Go to sleep.
10yo: can I go give Daddy a cuddle?
Me: no. Go to sleep.
10yo: por favor?
Me: na go'i ko sipna
6yo: what does that mean?
Me: no. go to sleep!

I wanted to wrangle the permission attitudinal in there but couldn't recall it off the top of my head. Also needed an .i but eh.

This house is more Menagerie than The Menagerie was.  Newest additions from left to right: Popcorn, Lucius and Nightshade (which may actually be Knight Shade as I suspect it was named after a Skylander), belonging to 8yo, 10yo and 6yo respectively.  We've had them for three days so far and they're settling in slowly.  Cats completely do not care about them.  Tali has sniffed them both in the cage and in my hand and been great.  Angus just wants to bite them. Which then of course stirs Tali up and he wants to play too! Working on that -_-

I'm doing a reasonable job doing everything else and an atrocious job blogging.

Perth Zoo

How I felt after falling over problem after problem as Sprat and I bugsquished another site, also representing yet another complete failure at getting to bed before midnight.

Also, folded arms are hard.

My completely unprofessional rig which is probably unusable by anyone else but does the job for me.  It's off-centre from the base (which everything is eventually parented to) because I did some ground stuff directly beforehand.  The arms are a bit awkward to position at times as I'm using the targets to control the rotation for the elbows as I can't seem to get pole targets working on arms for some reason (no problems on legs but legs are just easier).  I'll give it another shot before committing to the rig enough to transfer it to the other two models.

Screencap of Base after mouthing "Seriously again?" (it doesn't have a voice).  I'm trying to work out how to tackle doing bone drivers for the 10 phoneme key shapes I have.  They'll easily fit on the three mouth controllers that I have seeing as I only use one direction for anything but knowing my luck I'll have a hell of a time remembering what's what.

Still it may have to happen seeing as bone keys are a lot easier to move than shape key keys (I actually can't seem to move shape key keys at all for some reason).

This is a screenie, Base is actually looking directly at the camera so will be rendered more front on.

Set up controller bones (I like them in their own Armature) and make sure the "deform" box in the bone properties panel is unchecked.

I find it easier having the entire face moving around with the eye directional controller because I'm weird like that (and also they end up in odd places because of how I have the head controller).

On the mesh where the shape keys are, right click on the shape key that needs to be driven by the bone.  In this example the eyebrow raise.

Click "Add Driver" on the context menu that pops up.

No drabble this time round, sorry, brain is occupied with other things :)

When I did the head hair I did a scalp (copy of the...uh...scalp on the top of the head where the hair is growing out of shrunk down to fit just inside the head) with its own material to colour the hair strands because it was the easiest thing to do as the hair strands pick up whatever texture is applied to the geometry.  Wasn't too crazy about the extra geometry but couldn't work out how everyone else on the planet had done it so crashed around the particle system and node tree til I got something going.

Add the hair in the usual fashion:

Earlier today:

JJ: (whispers to 6yo to put a banana into the pancake mix they're making in the kitchen)
me (yelling from computer room): I can hear you from here.
6yo (stage whispering): Dad stop stage whispering!

Just then:

6yo: Dad can you give me a boost up for the stuff I'm biggenising?
JJ: ...you want me to help you make that bigger?
6yo: yes please.