First day over and not that much to show for it. I had some logistical problems: since I'm hogging the main computer, the idea was to get the old computer running to allow everyone else some internet time, but alas the old computer is more severely injured than I'd first thought. So I didn't get started until late, and then spent a lot of time futzing with rigging and not really making much progress. The theory was sound: I was using blenrig, which means that there's a cage already rigged and you just tailor it to your character. In practice, I was finding I needed to move the cage around a lot (my fault: my characters body dimensions weren't so good).

I decided that I was getting mired, so I switched from rigging a base character to try and get the basic animatic down, to modelling the base character before the rigging. If rigging is going to be a huge amount of time, I might as well do it once, on the final character. That seemed to go a lot better, both in terms of progress and lifting my enthusiasm and resulted in the picture I'm posting.

The evening we went out for my "Birthday Tea" and though I tried working after, I was so tired I just flopped to bed at 9. So a mixed day, which is probably ok for a first day.

The timing of the days doesn't really work out that great - in order to squeeze two weekends into the ten days, they have to be at either end. Ideally, I'd have these days in the middle, so I'd have a chance to work out where the big time sinks are first, then have the huge time chunk, then have less time doing things and just leaving the computer rendering. But it is what it is and that's why I'm doing the dummy run: to work out how to adapt to the conditions.

It has a working title now: "Kangaroo Court" and I've got most of the plot worked out and I'm still happy with the idea.

To infinity and beyond ...