When Things Just Need Sorted...

Hello, I'm moving over to this blog now rather than my other one.  The multiple-google-account-thing was really causing me issues, so this should fix it!

Update on Updating the Updated Updates

Well, it's time to start structuring my posts a bit, I think. I spend far too much time waffling aimlessly and miss things out... so here goes.

First, the SMART target thing.

S - Produce a walk cycle and a run cycle to go with my walk-run transition

M - By Tuesday I should be starting to colour up my line tests (or the best existing one)

A - Completely polish up my character sheets and, if I have spare time, produce some concepts of nameless characters. I might just add cat-cameos in. Easy way to differentiate background characters, and I get to draw my cats!

R - Finalize script. This may sound a bit odd since it should have been finalized ages ago, but the reason it's dragged on so long is basically because I just couldn't decide whether to have dialogue or not. Pros: It's easier to exposit on world backstory and character motivations, thus avoiding plotholes. Cons: it makes the animation seem like it could end up overtly mainstream and I think that silent characters that communicate purely with expressions and (cat!) body language could add a more natural feel to the story. And prevent them from being too... Humanized? Personified? Anthropomoromorphorizedificated? I don't know. I'll probably go with silent characters at this point, though, I just think it sort of suits me better. And it'll be a healthy challenge to see how much of the backstory I can reveal with image alone.

T - Just make sure the finalized storyboard matches the final script and check continuity before continuing line tests appropriate to that script.

Current Line Tests!

I have two line tests so far, both for my protagonist, Okri. Sorry that they're so faint.



This one is based on one of Muybridge's studies and I think it looks alright, but it's the one I need a walk cycle and run cycle for.



If you squint reeeeeeally carefully, you can see it's a sort of 3/4 view of Okri walking over and sitting down. I did extend this test so that once she's comfy she begins to clean herself, but I haven't actually line tested the rest yet. I'll upload when I do.

Critique

Had a critique too, it went fairly well. Well... if you ignore the fact that I got my Youtube accounts mixed up, tried to log into the wrong one, couldn't get the password right and so reset the password of that account to the wrong email account which I'd also lost the password for, so I reset the password for that email account so that I could get the reset password for my Youtube account, logged in to find it was the wrong one, so then I tried to log in using a different email but the password was wrong for that too, logged into the second email to check that it was the right Youtube account and eventually started chucking random emails and passwords at the Youtube login to discover ages later that both accounts were wrong, it was actually a third account I was after.

What a faff.

But anyway, I think it went okay other than that, but I've been warned to focus on the bigger picture and not get lost in details. What a load of rubbish, don't you think? Why, someone with a concise and accurate, completely organized mind like mine couldn't possibly become distracted by trivial detail and fail to cross the finish line! Right? Right?

...right?

D:

The 'I Have Been Doing Crap But Can't Prove It' Post

Hello again! It's been a bit, but that's because I forget everything (if I don't, there's a risk my brain could melt from too much rubbish floating around in it) so I forgot to update when I should have... typical of me eh?

Luckily I haven't been forgetting to do some work. Though I've been a bit sluggish getting to my line tests (which, from today and over the weekend hopefully will be caught up on a tad) that's because I've been trying to get my character sheets done. It's not so much as I've got a lot of characters (there's 4 main characters, but one of them has two forms, and there's a heck of a lot of nameless and background characters) but because, as usual, I just CAN'T STOP CHANGING THEM. But I've finally decided to draw the line, for my own sanity later down the line, and I'm finalizing the characters in this last batch of character sheets. I did have character sheets for my protagonist and antagonist already, but the protagonist changed a bit too much to salvage anything but the background picture from the original character sheet. The antagonist might be a different matter because when I originally designed him, I guess I knew what I wanted him to look like. So I'll probably salvage him, but he does still need two more turnarounds finished. Each sheet has the characters on all fours (if applicable) AND on two feet, and the antagonist will need one on his hind feet in cat form (finished already, nabbed from the original sheet), one on all fours, and one as his owl form. Not too much of a problem but y'know... it takes me a while. A long, long while.

I need to remember to do a size chart too. Size MATTERS *is slapped* Okay, okay, bad joke.

I forgot what I was talking about.

Oh yeah! Character sheets. I actually uploaded the latest ones to my personal gallery, and well... it's out there somewhere, floating in the internet. Too bad I can't find the damn thing. Ah well. I tried to upload them to deviantART, but stupid college system is stupid, and it's blocked me before I could even upload one. Helpful, eh? So, yep, been working, can't prove it.

Next on the list is to do my line tests then, I'll polish off the character sheets in my own time. Really nothing else to talk about. Going to see the Lion King in 3D later today, it's 'educational research' into how Disney tackles the movement of 'large cats that are totally related to what I'm doing' and not just 'I want to see this classic revisited'. Honest! Just like those kittens we bought on Saturday. Those two adorable but up until yesterday very loppy 8-week old kittens were for 'research' and not 'those kittens are so adorable we have enough space and money to get them and I'm sure company would bring our older cat out of his moping so let's buy them'. Honestly though, they're adorable, we named them Jindo the Dogbreaker and Todd. Todd looks like a little fox and he's a perfect mix of mischevious and shy, with a proper babyface to boot. Jindo the Dogbreaker (if you've ever played World of Warcraft, you might get the joke) really suits his name... at the vets the other day our young dog Izzi came to sniff him in his cage, and did he hiss and shy away like normal cats? Did he hide? Try to run? Hell no. He LUNGED AT THE SIDE OF THE CAGE TO RIP OFF IZZI'S FACE.

I also saw a cat on Youtube while touching up my research that just boggled my mind... see, my older cat, Sunny, is obese, at about 6.5 kilos of weight. I'm taking measures to try and make sure no one else is feeding him while I put him on Royal Canin Obesity Management food, but even at his weight, you can't really notice any difficulty in general movement (he has a greasy lower back though because he can't clean it properly. Cat shampoo~) but he can get up, lie down, jump around, and he's still perfectly happy to go out and night and brawl with other cats and chase them around and all that territorial stuff. He's a big cat though. Now imagine my horror, when I thought my cat was honestly about as big as a cat would get, when I find a cat on Youtube TWICE SUNNY'S WEIGHT at over 12 kilos? This cat... honestly... it could barely get up. Watching it struggle just to stand up from lying down was horrifying. You know, I'm going to try and find a video of it, just do everyone can share my horror.



And I don't even think that was the fattest one I've seen... that's horrid. Put the poor thing on a diet.

Sorry about my rant though.

The Best Way to Keep Videos...

Hello there again! A bit soon to be posting again, but I'm finishing up my research. I don't actually have huge amounts of real footage of the species of my characters in motion, and if I want it to be as realistic as I imagine it, I'm gonna need a lot of that footage!

Getting bird footage is... well... difficult. Come back, birds! Where am I going to find myself a large bird of prey? An owl? Something? ...okay, surely I can gather my own cat footage. Yes, I tried, it did not go well. The most athletic thing Sunny can do is roll over. Bless him.



That poor owl. I thought it would probably make more sense to look at the owl being fairly stationary, and though the quality isn't fantastic, you do get to see some simple body language. That owl is not a happy owl!



Same idea here; this little owl is quite relaxed. (The panting might suggest otherwise, but as the video says, it's actually just keeping itself cool).



Now that is an impressive owl. Look how pretty he/she is! More what I'm shooting for for my villain. Get to see him/her moving around a bit too, which is useful. :)

The following are flying references; since that's what the scene involving the owl has him doing the most.



A nice little video of an Eagle owl; get to see him/her taking off, gaining speed, gliding, changing direction, and landing. If only it were in slow motion...



That's better, much better! To be honest I couldn't tell whether it was a very good piece of 3D animation at first or real footage. After seeing Legend of the Owls: Guardians of Ga'Hoole I just can't be sure anymore!



Two for the price of one. For some reason I really love 0:17 - 0:19 when the Great Horned Owl avoids the branches of that tree. But even more impressive is the agility of the bird in this video...



Why that is just unbelievable. I know that it's a Goshawk, not an Owl, but I think I can take a bit of licence when it comes to animating my owl, provided I can actually pull it off. That bird is amazing!

And here's some other, perhaps less related birds that I looked at, but they were very interesting to look at none the less, and I absolutely don't see any harm in giving my Owl the capabilities of other birds. He is an evil warlord with magic! :D











And I have to link these two because embedding is disabled:

http://youtu.be/gVdphioscJA
http://youtu.be/MOqteBWgBqM

Next up, cats! Like I said, my cat Sunny is a bit on the portly side, and he doesn't move much, and when he does, he doesn't move far. I mean, to be entirely fair on him, he does go out at night sometimes and probably beats up other cats in the neighbourhood but I'm not going to chase him off into the night, crawling through hedges, hopping into peoples' gardens... nicking other people's references is much, much easier!



Now this is supposed to be a video of two cats fighting in slow motion. The thing is, they're not fighting, they're just playing. The movement is still good to have though.



This is two cats fighting. It's a small fight - ever seen a REAL "extreme cat fight"? I'll tell you now, it is vicious. And it's not funny. I hate it when people get a severely distressed cat that's hissing and spitting because it's absolutely petrified and laugh about it. But I digress. Two cats scrapping. But thinking on more about it, I don't think I'll have this style of fighting, though I might keep elements of it, particularly the staring match that occurs between two cats in a confrontation.



This is a reasonably nice reference for a cat running (but why are the reference videos always in such low quality?)and personally the run cycle looks rather similar to that of a dog to me, so I could probably mix some elements of a dog run into my heavier set cat characters.

It was just then, when I couldn't find any more good videos, and all hope seemed lost, when I found out that Whiskas had a channel! Their cat biscuits and supermeat cans are absolute crap (but Sunny sure loves their packeted soft food) but these videos are fantastic. If only they weren't cut into like that they would be much better.



Cat leaping. Very good thing to have, I expect my characters are going to do a lot of fancy jumping around in trees!



Wow, that does look quite menacing.



While it's good that I found a video like this because my protagonist in my draft storyboards does fall on her feet, I feel kind of sorry for the cat just being dropped like that.



I really don't know whether I'll include a scene in which a cat is cleaning themselves, but given how much my protagonist looks like a bald rat, maybe I should. Tell the viewers, 'Okay, I know this looks like a rat, but it's actually a cat. Look, cleaning itself like a cat! Totally a cat'.



Awww! ...Ewww. ...Awww! ...Ewww. ...Awww!

That's all I have time for now, but before I post, this video has both cats AND a bird of prey in it, and I couldn't believe what I was looking at when I saw it!



That... is a BRAVE cat.

Year 2: Ready, set...

I really can't believe it's already the Friday of our first week back.

I've been off so long, it feels like a lifetime. (And yes, I did intend to keep updating my blog throughout the long holiday, but the thousands of projects I habitually assign for myself leave me brainfried, and things I originally intend to do get forgotten).

I didn't forget about our upcoming project either; this one has to be under 3 minutes long and character-based. I think, though, that the time constraint is more a combination of Dave trying to make sure we don't bite off more than we can chew and shoot for The Lord of the Rings: The Animation! and because, if I remember right, the 3 minutes is the time limit for a submission to the Pictoplasma animation festival. But I think longer animations will actually be acceptable provided we can manage to finish the things in time, as the other animation festivals allow longer submissions.

For this project I decided to do cats. Why cats? Because I like cats! And birds actually. Magical birds. And the cats are tribal and one's a warlord who's actually an owl with a magical voodoo mask that turns him into a cat. And he's worshipped by the real cats. Who bring him birds. Magical birds. And he takes the magic from the magical birds which makes them into dead birds. It's the perfect plan!

Seriously though, there was actually a thought process that lead to this, but I'll get to it later. I expect I'll just blab endlessly about it when I do the research commentary (research is very awkward to write, isn't it? Honestly, I looked at this cat... and I looked at this bird... it's... a cat... and a bird... ) and finish all that up by Monday.
I'm actually hoping that this will be my first mixed media animation - I've realized, over the past year, that I am very, very dependent on Adobe Photoshop. Good old Adobe Photoshop! But while I stay using it, I'm not using other techniques or anything, and I'm worried my learning has suffered for it. So, this year, I'm forcing myself into a brand new work flow! I'm going to use more traditional techniques and try to combine different media and/or type of animation (and honestly, I think this intent did have a hand in shaping my project idea in the last stretch of its initial conception, it's hard to explain). For the most part, I think the animation will be traditional, hand drawn animation - on a light box, not on Adobe Photoshop... (though I might colour it up on either Photoshop or Illustrator, but Illustrator makes everything look -very- perfect with those fancy vectors and I would rather it was sketchy and rough looking) and the magic sequences I would like to do a different way, perhaps using cutout/silhouette animation. I was going to give the bird's magic very African-feeling patterns and colours, changing the background to a lush red and the like, so silhouetted characters I think would work nicely.
I'd also be able to use them to make the final fight between the protagonist and the antagonist quite nightmarish which would be exactly what I want.
I've also given myself a challenge to learn to use watercolour pencils or paints for the backgrounds while magic isn't being used; to get a sort of pale, easy on the eyes natural location... that is if I can learn to use them. Watercolours are much harder than they look!
I'm also interested in trying a bit of collage or stitching. Two years studying textiles and I haven't used a single technique in my animations. I mean... I'm not great at it by any means, but perhaps some mola cutwork or something for the magic sequences... I'm not sure.

Anyway, enough of my waffling about that. My original idea was about cats, and what they do when humans aren't looking. Anyone who's owned a cat knows that they have this amazing ability to vanish at will (Invisible Cats: The Movie?) and only return at dinner time, or when they smell your tuna sandwich. It was partially inspired by an in-joke I had with my sister about our old cat Tamara - yeah, Tamara was a snooty mastermind, he owned a casino underground. And our younger cat, Sunny, a stocky beast of a cat, he's a bouncer.
The story was originally going to be Sunny/a character inspired by Sunny discovers the casino, gets hired as a bouncer, and experiences gangs clashing; this series of events all being held together by the giggles stemming from the fact that Sunny is as thick as a brick. However I became hesitant to base a story so much on faces from home, so my second brainstorm became about a Sphinx cat (that would eventually become Okko), a cat adopted by two blackbirds after being mistaken for one of their chicks. The Sphinx grows up with the birds and becomes the avian equivalent to a superhero, fighting off the tame cats that hunt the birds in huge, exaggerated Kung-Fu Panda type fight scenes. The final challenge would be to take down the fiercest bird-killer of all, referred to as the Terrible Catbird, which is actually a large owl (this would later become Vorquan, my current draft's antagonist). Again, this would sort of be its own parody, and not meant to be taken seriously. The reason I actually dropped this draft - or altered the crap out of it, however you like to look at it - is because I was worried about this trend of funny slapstick stuff I seem to have fallen into. The thing is, I never touched or attempted funny stuff before I started my first year. It's not that I don't appreciate the talent and effort that goes into a good joke, but I don't have that talent. I'm not funny and I keep trying to be. I don't even like slapstick!

For that matter, I never usually have animals as characters either, but I don't mind it.

So, I thought okay, perhaps I'll do better on this project if I stop trying to do something that I'm just no good at. This prompted me to tweak the setting of the story: I swapped the houses and gardens for a great forest/jungle hybrid and added some fantastical elements. No where in the animation will the viewer be told they are in a more magical world, but hopefully the rules of the world will be fairly apparent: birds are naturally magical, and it is this magic that allows them to fly. The cats are magicless and somewhat tribal but still follow some general animal behaviour.

The story itself is about a cat called Okko, who is a Sphinx cat (Trivia! In the early drafts, she was male. I changed her into a female because when I sketched her she looked feminine and because I'm a feminist. :D ) who lost her mother as a kitten, but is adopted by Ralla'ool, a Purple-Crested Touraco. When Ralla'ool is kidnapped by cats and brought before the supposed God and warlord cat, Vorquan, Okko must fight to save her. During the fight, though, she strikes a blow to Vorquan's face and knocks off his mask, and he reverts to his true form, a Great Horned Owl roc. Okko finally defeats him by slamming his mask back onto his face mid-flight, turning him back into his cat form, and he falls to his death. Okko is saved from a similar fate by Ralla'ool.

The story still has its fair share of issues and the plot doesn't tie together as neatly as I would like, but I'll work on it.

As a random aside, here are some of my favourite commercial cat animations! Finding less mainstream animation with the accuracy of movement and lack of extreme stylization I'm after has proven, well... it's hard. I mean... unless you count this.



Oh, Mr. Oreilly, you do disturb me greatly. :)

There's this too, 'Please Say Something' which I really like in its own right but it isn't what I want for this animation.

Please Say Something from David OReilly on Vimeo.

...and Catface.



And here are my favourite mainstream animations so far! Firstly - and you'll see this one coming a mile off - Disney's Aristocats.



Apologies for the fact that it's not in English, it was better quality than the English ones I could find. What I love about this film is how realistic the cats are; they still have their typical Disney style as far as the character designs themselves go, but their proportions and anatomy is a bit more down to earth and it helps the movement look very natural. Compare the cats here to, say, Lucifer from Cindarella.



Doesn't really move like a cat at all. He moves like the typical cartoony slapstick character; he moves like Tom from Tom and Jerry moving on four legs instead of two. Oh, hey, another cat to look at. Fancy that!

I could do a huge long list of Disney cat characters that are poorly animated in the sense that they don't move like cats compared to the characters in the Aristocats, but I think it would be slightly redundant. Sergeant Tibbs in Disney's 'One Hundred and One Dalmatians' has a lovely design but he doesn't really move like a cat. To be fair, most of the time he's marching, but the animation is still nothing compared to Aristocats. But the dogs move fantastically. Why? Because the main characters are dogs, they get the most screen time, so its reasonable to say that more time for research and more time for animation was afforded to the leading characters. That's all it is, really, I believe. On a very random aside, the animation of the cats below still isn't as good as the Aristocats. But they needed to be posted somewhere. You can't look at Disney cats and not look at these two.



They're so cute, yet so evil, and so catlike, yet so evil. Love them. They do look curiously like the Siamese from the 'Everybody Wants to be a Cat' song in Aristocats though.

Stop. DonBluthtime.

Don Bluth's 'Banjo the Woodpile Cat':







I'll tell you now, I love Don Bluth. He is the master of facial expressions and dialogue animation - just take a look at 3:09 to 3:25 on that first video. I watched that bit so many times its unbelievable.

The cats in this animation are a bit odd in that they flip-flop very severely between being excellently accurate to... getting up on their back feet and dancing the night away. It's somewhat typical of films like this (it happens in Disney films too) that in upbeat sequences the characters become more humanlike, though, and its not really something that bothers me too much, but when the cats are being catlike, it's done fantastically. I wouldn't go as far to say that it's better than the Aristocats, but its still very good. And the characters are adorable, especially Banjo.

Next up I'm going to take a look at Studio Ghibli's The Cat Returns. Good film, if a touch short.

Believe it or Not, I'm alive!

Yes, I realize that it's been a while since my last update.  Apologies as usual, once again, my infamous lack of consistency has won the day!

(It's a work in progress, promise.)


Wow, before I continue, I just have to say that Blogger is being unusually glitchy today.  I press enter to skip a line and my cursor goes flying all over the place.  Might just be me but still... odd.

Anyway, I've been busy looking at a lot of 3D animation, even as entertainment!  (How's THAT for two birds with one stone?) And recently went to see a recently released film called Rio (twice in a week) that I found  to be particularly noteworthy for its rather bizarre blend of realism and anthropomorphism.  Usually, bird characters are notorious for being very anthropomorphised - wings become arms, feathers become fingers, beaks become lips, etc.  very little of their natural movement is conserved - in fact, the best example I can think of other than Rio is the pidgeons in Bolt which were also good for it, though the difference between those and the characters in Rio is that they are more comedy relief and aren't true protagonists and so they don't have the duty of conveying all the emotions the protagonists of Rio have to.  That being said, Rio is probably the best (in terms of realism) mainstream film I've seen yet for capturing the mannerisms of birds while the emotiveness and likeability of the characters doesn't suffer at all for it.  For the most part, wings are wings, beaks are beaks, and feet are feet and hands... which is sort of right, parrots and the like have very good control of their feet.

It reminds me of Ratatouille which was also kind of unusual for retaining more animal characteristics than are usually retained in this sort of animated film.  I have to say it makes a pleasant change.  I really appreciate the love and care it must take to believably recreate the animalistic motions in these sorts of characters (particularly in birds) and I think it does help the characters from an emotion standpoint - they become more the animals they're based on than humans that sort of look like animals, though the rendition does work well in films like Kung Fu Panda (2008).  A film that also comes to mind is Valiant (2005) in which the pidgeon characters are VERY humanlike... actually, the mouse character is too.  Now there's a comparison I need to add to my research.  Rio/Ratatouille versus Valiant in terms of animation style.  Wait.  Wait.  Another one is coming to mind... Ah!  The Ugly Duckling and Me.  Very very humanised rat and bird characters to compare, though the CGI in that film was already outdated by the time it was released... ah well, animation is what's important.

The worst thing is, I don't know about The Ugly Duckling and Me, but I think Valiant would have been much more effective if it had more of the realism that Rio had; I think rather than making the characters more small flying humans (with only small references or changes to dialogue to remind you that they're little pidgeons, besides the overtly human-like visuals) if they were actually displayed closer to the small, vunerable birds they are the film could have 1) been less offencive with racial stereotypes and 2) had a greater sense of peril.  Rio did an excellent job of making the characters have conflict on their own level (via Nigel, the primary bird antagonist) but also keeping the audience aware of the bigger picture (via many perils of the city and smugglers).  Valiant should theoretically have a big focus on the bigger picture (they are delivering messages during warfare after all) as well as the bird antagonists.

I know I've never been keen on characters with too many humanized characteristics so there's obviously some bias present, but I do think Valiant could have worked very well if the characters were... how to say it... less soldier, more pidgeon.

On a completely different note, I recently purchaced a new game that was on offer - well, actually, quite an old game.  It's The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.  Now, going back to a game like this:

After being very used to games that look like this:

Is naturally going to have the player urking at the graphics for a while until they get used to them. That's normal. But the thing I noticed was... why are the characters in these older games made up of multiple pieces as opposed to characters in newer games that are usually a smooth mesh?  I'd say obviously graphical limitations but doesn't having several parts make the model just as graphically straining as having the same model joined together, with the same poly count?  I'm thinking it might be to allow the characters to perform nessessary animations without having to worry about essentially 'scoring' the joints so that they can bend without too much deformation (and therefore ending up with a lower poly count) but can I hear anyone else's ideas about why this might be?

That randomness aside, it's back to work, turning these messy notes into readable material.  I need to finish my dragon model too (I'm thinking of prioritizing the Faun for now until I make my desired tweaks to the dragon's mesh - and I still need to figure out how to do those wings.  I've been looking at a couple traditional dragons in CGI - Dragonheart, Dragonheart 2, Eragon, The Last Dragon, etc.  No one ever animates bats in detail in 3D... or maybe I just need to search harder.  Poor bats.  So cute but they never get any love!)

Anyway, I'm off for now, see everyone tomorrow!

Updates Don't Get Much Later Than This

Hello again, time for an update.  A very, very late update.

So work on my 3D character has been coming along alright.  The basic model of the body is more or less done, except for the few bits of clothing my character wears which I'm going to add separately (and hopefully add cloth physics to).  He's also going to need hair and fur, but I think as far as the hair is concerned I'm going to go for a partially clumped look, maybe with strands of hair partially visible at the tips of the hair if possible...

(And yes, as an example of what I'm thinking, I'm going to refer to an old favourite of mine.  Yay for predictability!)

Like this perhaps.  Bless you for your simple CGI, Final Fantasy IX.  Bless you.  *salute*



It's the best example I could get for what I want.  Blocky, but floppy.  Surprisingly not that common nowadays! (Usually, it's either floppy and realistic or blocky and stiff, which isn't what I'm after).

On top of that, I might make minor changes to his mesh but it's not decided yet.  Originally, the intention was to try for a style part way between Hiccup from Dreamworks's recently released CG film 'How to Train Your Dragon':



and Disney's older, traditionally animated film, 'Tarzan':

Sorry if that's a tad big.  Anyhoo, Tarzan uses this nice, clean, angular sort of style I wanted to use.  A similar style is found in Disney's 2001 film 'Atlantis: The Lost Empire'.  But my character sort of evolved away from the angular style, probably out of personal habit more than anything else.  I'm considering adding in extra loops in order to just sharpen the edges I already have.

I would take some full body screenshots of my model to put here, but Cinema 4D is locked down right now (it always is before noon on Mondays, what a pain) so this will have to do.

'What'chu lookin' at?'

Yeah... it's got a way to go, though I'm happy so far.  I'm currently working to get him all rigged up, and also to come up with a name for him.  Everyone keeps calling him Mr. Tumnus, but I think I'll have to pass on that one.  Don't really have the money to just go around getting myself sued... sorry guys.

Since Fauns are supposedly from Roman mythology (as opposed to Greek, which I think was the case with Satyrs who often get confused with Fauns) I took a look at some old Roman names and thought Felix suited him.  But since he lives in a completely seperate fantasy world, I might just scrap it later... I'll see how I feel about it after some thought.  Felix is a cute name.

I have a long list of animations I've been looking at but I'm going to pop them all in my next post.  For now, I have much Cinema 4D experimentation and possible computer-killing to do.  Next time!