drop the bomb productions

I've been working recently on Nick's eyelids, something that's traditionally been very hard for me. After reading "Digital Character Animation 3" by George Maestri, I gained some new techniques for working on the eyelids. It isn't as realistic at the method I was horrible at, but I'm not going for realistic here. I just want a simple cartoon that will get the message across. I'm not a complex detail-type of person and the good thing about animation is that there are styles anywhere from minimalist to Pixar and DreamWorks near-realism. (And Square's almost hyper-realism)

Once I'm done with that I just need to work on some shape keys for Nick and fix part of the interior of his mouth.

If there's a lesson to be learned with Nick that I want to share with all learning computer animators out there, it's this - do not apply your subsurf until you are 100% done with your characters. I have so many verts now that doing any changes to his body are excruciatingly slow. In fact, while working on Nick's face, I had to move modeling over to my Windows computer because it has 4 times as much RAM. Even then, it is very hard to work with the mesh. So, don't apply your subsurfs until you're sure there will not be any more changes to the mesh.

Wallace, our other character is mostly complete as far as modeling goes. I do want to redo his hands. Again, I found a better method of hand creation in the aforementioned book. I also have to decide if I'm going to have mesh hair or more particle hair like Nick. After that, all that's left is to rig him up and rig him. Later, once I have everything else set, I'll worry about getting all the materials and textures correct on him.

Then the fun part (animation) can begin!