Class yesterday was sobering and put a fire in my belly! Prof. Halbstein asked if I was going to have my thesis done; ouch! I'm still fixing the rigs with their deformations but elegance is creeping into their construction. The IK handles and their controls are working, the skinning is becoming easier, there is more facility with the painting weights and component editor work flow and setting the joints, smooth bind settings and deformations is now a process verses an experiment. At class we were able to fix an eyelash problem I was having and he gave us a useful tool for rendering without the Maya GUI. If you convert a text file in a properly set up project scene folder and rename it as a .bat file it becomes an executable render command that renders all your scenes according to the globals you set up within each of them. Hopefully this will cut the weeks worth of rendering time in half!
Enough blogging time to FINISH the rigs!