Error riddled but I'm calling it done so I can move along with other things.  Like characters and sets and maybe more paintovers.  Least my arm rig works which was the purpose of the exercise!

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.

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:

I have no idea what I'm doing (despite reading the internet).

I had to redo the hair emitters about a million times because I kept blowing something up (and not knowing what I blew up, but combing strands in Particle Mode is kind of amusing for a while).  When I finally got that sorted my first test looked like a polyp colony.

When I eventually got something I liked I couldn't work out how to get the red (which is actually supposed to be bleached but I just grabbed a random high constrasting colour at the time) to just be on the mohawk (probably needed a uv map) and then the fuzz on the side was playing silly buggers.

When I'm not finding UV mapping agonisingly quirky, I'm being frustrated by Blender's borderline unusable viewport lagginess at 2.2M polys.  There is some progress being made.  UV mapping was interesting as I couldn't figure out how to project onto part of a mesh like I've done previously in Lightwave so I ended up mapping the entire object om question.  For the shirt I just painted the whole thing and ued minimal nodes for colour and bump maps.  For the tattoos and face markings I stuffed around a hell of a lot with the skin shader and eventually got them on there but it now means I have blue freckles instead of dark brown.

I had spent a decent amount of time regaling 10yo with hilarious episodes of my 3d experimentations revolving around the shenanigans that can happen when one doesn't parent controllers properly or grabs bones instead of controllers by accident and stuff like that.  Then to prove that parents don't know everything I showed him that I was researching some way to use a complete dynatopo sculpt rather than finishing off the multires one I was working on.  While talking to him I started fixing up some errors I hadn't noticed in the dynatopo sculpt at the time and zoomed out a bit too far, causing a brush stroke to remove too much detail over the bit I brushed over.  I cried out "OH CRAP" and promptly hit the undo combo.  10yo came scurrying into the room crying "WAIT I WANT TO SEE YOUR HORRENDOUS MISTAKE!"

I was working on 3d-bek's feet when 5yo came in and observed what was on my screen.

He stared for a little bit, then leaned on my desk so he could pick up and scrutinise his own cute little foot carefully before pointing out that toes weren't square, but at least I got one right.  I told him that my base model was very square and I was fixing it up as I made my characters, and that's what I was doing right now.  He wished me luck fixing it up and trotted on his merry way.  Cutely.

And the foot is coming along nicely.  Be onto UV mapping, cloth dynamics and hair in about that order soonish.

This is another one of those rare instances where I post to an external site before the blog.

I haven't had a chance to set up a video thingi yet and am not willing to do it from Christmas Island (internet is tooooooooo slooooooowwwwwwww) so I am attempting to finally try to start getting over the grudge I have against Google over their mind numbingly idiotic real names policy that resulted in the nymwars (to their credit they have seemed to realise how stupid the policy was and how stupid it made them look and are now letting people call themselves whatever, and are now no longer forcing Youtube channels to be attached to G+ pages if you decide you don't actually want to use your own name, I have decided I seriously can't be bothered trying to recreate my old ryivhnn channel.