A couple people wrote and asked why I've been so reluctant to post anything about my animation work-in-progress. It's not a question of being shy about my "art," although showcasing incomplete work can admittedly lead to too-many-cooks syndrome sometimes. No, I'm simply trying to spare you the unimaginable tedium such an indulgence would lead to.

By way of illustration, here's an amazing simulation of what it would be like to read such an entry:

The rig so far, with TSM-added FK/IK targets.

Finally finished the shoulder rig last night. It took nine fan-bones with meticulously arranged origin points, but I don't know that Smartskin would've been any faster, especially with the inexplicable stray-CP artifacts I had to iron out manually on the hip/knee joints. I wish it could've gone more swiftly than the 16 painstaking hours I had to spend making minute trial-and-error alterations to the Orient-Like constraint enforcement percentages, but then, shoulders are tough for everybody. A:M's inability to mirror bones has resulted in a less-than-symmetrical skeletal system, a shortcoming I find baffling in a modern spline-based modeling environment. Hopefully with the toon rendering no one should notice.

See what I mean? You'd be begging me for more photos of temples after a few days of that.

Believe it or not, all the stuff written above is true. I am, in fact, feeling groggy and worn out from one too many late nights spent staring at... well, see the above screenshot. Exactly as I predicted I would be, I note.

Still, I wouldn't trade my new life for anything. Even with the near-debilitating amount of time I'm spending on my geeky hobby, a glance at my calendar reveals that I'm actually socializing more than I did while at Nova. In the last two weeks, I've been out dining with Daisuke, had tea with Minako, and got shown around the Edo Museum by Sumie. This time tomorrow I'll be seeing Fahrenheit 9/11 with Daniel, and I've even got a special surprise visitor coming next month. It's good. I wouldn't want to live this kind of life indefinitely—too many instant-ramen dinners, for my taste— but it's mighty fine for now.