I only started the remake of stickman because I was asked to and would be paid for it. We came to an agreement, but my client did not hold his end of the agreement. Fortunately, I did not send him the final result. He just has an old alpha version which still had a number of bugs, which from a usability point of view make it useless.

But it does mean I started rethinking how I will release my rigs. This is not the first time something like this happened, and I’m getting fed up with it. I keep working on my rigs, but I’m seriously considering not sharing them anymore, or start a small web-store where you can just buy a license for it instead.

So right now I only have blender 2.4X series rigs available for download, and I don’t think I will release my 2.6X rigs. Not for free anyway. I know there’s a bunch of you out there who have been waiting for some time for me to finish another rig. Sorry, but I will not be releasing them for free anymore. I hope you will understand.

I also have an actual update. I finished the facial system, nice and flexible. I made a version of newfella with 5-finger hands (the normal one has mittens), just so I would have one character that has all the features I consider to be “default”.

Facial rig in place, and a version with different arms.

It’s been a looooooooooong time… How have you been? Still traveling the world, currently doing a dive master course, but I had some time to work on something new… well…. old AND new. I’m redoing MTI_stickman. The reason for that is that he is still very popular and gets downloaded a lot, but well honestly, he’s the only character that still makes me some money every now and then, and someone asked me to do a 2.5 version.

So coming soon: an old character with a shiny new rig. Same features as before, but more features to go along it, smoother bending in the joints, some more options like control the bendyness of the character without having to use all the tiny little cubes. You can still use these by the way. I came to call those the “freestretch system”. Some things have been simplified, and you have a nice rig menu where you can find everything.

Here are some images and a youtube video:

Looks about the same, handles a lot better.

Here are the work-in-progress colours.

Just starting to take shape.

And he needs a new logo.

I’ve been staying mainly in Kosgoda for the first few weeks where I did volunteer work, with trips mostly taking place during the weekends. The volunteer work was with turtles, but you can see it as more of a holiday since most of the people who come here are gap year people. The work is not hard. And even though one might argue that cleaning the turtles and turtle tanks is dirty, it is still pretty light labor.

But now my time in Kosgoda has ended, and I’ve moved down south to a place called Weligama, where there is a big project about handicapped people. This project is so vast it makes the turtle project I was at previously pale in comparison. Not that it is any less luxurious, far from it, but there is just soo much more serious work to be done here. Stuff actually needs to be build and maintained here.

And that’s where Blender came in the second day I was here: They had previously built a tea nursery/plantage, but they used wooden poles, and woven ropes, which rot away very quickly around here. Which means the tea also rots/gets eaten by bugs, etc… So they asked me if I can weld one out of metal pipes. I can weld a little, so I said yes. But it turned out they did have the plans in their head, but not yet in paper. So to visualize it for myself, and to more easily calculate the lengths we’d be needing, I quickly drew up something in blender. The thing isn’t build yet, and I wonder how well it will go. The main idea is that the tea nursery is on flat ground, but the actual nursery is on an uneven slope. I’ll also be welding material I’ve never welded before, but hey I’m curious how it will turn out.

Here are some images. The blender drawing, and the photos of the current tea nursery:

Won't win any beauty awards, but it gets the idea across.

Welcome to Hellabeem.

The old tea nursery.

Again, just like MTI_biped/blockman, if you like my stickman character rig, you will love this MTI_littlefella rig. It handles like stickman and it has hands, feet and a facial rig. You can think of it as a MTI_biped_very_light. It also comes with a manual which is useful if you are new to blender.

The license is a bit different this time. It’s the same as stickman, character and rig free for your own non-commercial projects, for commercial stuff please contact me.

Download him at the download page here.

MTI_littlefella, fresh rig for good old blender 2.49b.

The old version, made on blender 2.44/2.45.

And the new version. Made in blender 2.49b.

I also did a few other doodles in between, you can see them after the “Read the rest of this entry” link.

Creature sculpture.

A few steps further.

When a little kid from a friend came to see what I was doing, he grabbed a pen and paper and started to draw a "stickfigure" martian. And then he asked me if I could make that. This is the result so far.

Martian again.

Update on newfella: different head, different eyes, will have the MTI_biped rig.

There’s more but I’m not telling yet

It’s current features are:

- sidebar UI.
- sliders are context sensitive, and only appear when relevant bones (such as limbs) are selected
- FK/IK switches
- Hinges
- Knee and elbow slides
- Stretch
- Bendy/straight limbs and spine.
- Bone layers.
- A LOT of control, with little controls. I try to stuff as much control in every single bone as possible.
- a separate set of bone layers for easier editing and refitting the rig to a new character.

So, images and a video (more after “Read the rest of this entry”):

Kick it!

Some sliders, and all the controls.

Stance...

Crouching with bendy limbs.

Stretchy.

And I’ve made a few sculptures. I think I have a nice basemesh for a full body, so I am releasing it here. I’m licensing it as Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported. Basically this means you can do anything you want with it, including making money, as long as you don’t claim you created the original mesh and bother other people who also use it.

Since I like to make some kind of splash image for my stuff, here it is:

Get it here or head on over to the download page.

And some Work in Progress sculptures after the “Read the rest of this entry” link:

Made with an earlier version of the basemesh.

Made with an earlier version of the MTI_charbase.

Sculpted from a cube with some extrusions.

And this is from the envelope test a while ago...

The people all had very different backgrounds, and different reasons to go abroad. For a number of them, this was the fact that they had a boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife in another country. This is, let’s just be honest, one of the main reasons for people to travel. It’s never about where you go, or just about the culture, it’s always about the people you meet that make something worthwhile doing or not. Another reason is that you genuinely want to experience other cultures and their way of life. Maybe because you are bored back home, or because you really want to get as much as you want out of life. But then again, what is it that defines culture? It all comes down to people again. When I was in Sri Lanka I met some of the friendliest people I know, and I also met some of the most vile people I’d rather not know. I also met a lot of cool people in Bulgaria, which is a reason I want to go back there, to meet more of them .

So, let’s get back to the actual course, what exactly was it about?
Basically, we had to learn, or show we had the awareness of the basic concepts of language teaching.
We had to show an understanding of basic English grammar. This is something non-native speakers actually excel at. Native speakers have a lot more trouble with their own grammar. We had one assignment that had us match up cards that held sentences with cards that held grammatical structures. We solved it very quickly. Our teacher told us that native speakers really struggle with this. They asked: “Do we really need to learn this?” And our native speaking teacher told them: “Yes you do, because dutch people (non-native speakers) can do this in a heartbeat.” English may be our second language, but there is something about the way in which we are taught, that makes us remember these things better. If you have your native language, you tend to take all these rules and structures for granted. They come easily to you. But if it isn’t, you have to put in more effort to learn it, and it sticks in your mind better.

We were given a few language classes in a foreign language that none of us knew (Swedish), so we could better understand what we should, and shouldn’t do. The first lesson focussed on having us pronounce words, and sentences. We could speak the sentence at the end of the lesson, but nobody had any clue about its meaning. Then, we had another lesson with a few of the same words, but put into context with a flash card or a drawing. That way, it was much easier to remember both the word and idea or structure behind it. We were presented with a lesson with a cuddly toy, to say simple things like “hello”, “good/well done” and goodbye” in swedish.

From the coursebook:
When we teach our non-native students new language, we do it this way:

1. Meaning Teach or show the meaning through context or story.
2. Pronunciation Teach or drill the pronunciation until our students can say it naturally.
3. Form Teach or show the way it is written

It makes complete sense to teach a language structure in this way:

1. What does it mean? (Meaning)
2. What does it sound like? (Pronunciation)
3. What does it look like? (Form)

It does make sense, doesn’t it?
We were shown how versatile the game “find someone who” is.
We had to create a few lesson plans, and teach them to the rest of the students. This part was a lot of fun. Put a little role play into it, present the grammar structure somewhere during the lesson, but don’t make that the main target of the lesson. Don’t focuss on the actual structure. The desired outcome is that students can communicate with the structure. There are countries where English is taught in such a way that students understand English grammar close to perfection, and they can write English flawlessly. But put them in a situation where they have to use their English knowledge to have a real conversation, and they get stuck. Because they don’t know how. This is the difference between knowing a structure, and knowing how to put it to use in a real life situation.

We were shown (also mentioned in the rest of the TEFL course, but it is important, so it never hurts to mention it again) that it is better to elicit the meaning of something from a student, than to just explain it. You can use concept questions to make sure that students understand what you are trying to teach them.

Something else about pronunciation: I read somewhere on the internet, that a lot of schools want their teachers to speak as close to native English as possible, to have no accent whatsoever. There are some important overlooked aspects to that:

• I’m not so certain there is one universal version of English. Not only is there a difference between American and British English, but there are a lot of accents in english as well, and English people with one accent can have difficulty understanding English people with another accent, apparently. When the English queen Elizabeth 2nd had her coronation, it was going to be broadcast on television. For the first time in history, there was a need for a version of English that all people could understand. A standard English (I haven’t researched this enough to be certain, I heard it, and did a quick search on the internet, there are a number of wikipedia pages about this).
• I read on the internet that if students get taught English in their own accent, it becomes a lot easier for them to understand the structure, and communicate with it. To me, this makes sense, I haven’t traveled that much, but I found in a few countries that if you twist your accent to the way the local population speaks english, it becomes a lot easier for them to understand you. Indian people for instance are very good at speaking english, but a lot of us western people don’t see this because of their accent. While their level of understanding of the language is quite high. As an example, our teacher mimicked a french girl who wanted to take english classes. We (the students) had to assess her level. We all placed her much lower than she was, from elementary to intermediate. But she was actually at the level of advanced. Our teacher told us that this is a mistake almost everyone makes. Because of her intonation and pronunciation, we misjudged her, but her usage of english structures was pretty much flawless.

Not to say that it is bad to teach English with a more native pronunciation, but students learn to communicate more easily if you teach them with their own accent. And having an accent doesn’t make you less skilled as an English speaker.

There is loads more, but that is what the course is for. Either way, it was a very fun and at the same time productive weekend.

On another note, (switching to 3D artist mode), I read on the blenderartists forum about people who were wondering when or if Zbrush Zspheres would make it into blender. I figured if you create an armature, and use bones in envelope display mode, you could at least emulate how this looks. You can’t use this to automatically create automatic (heh, funny) geometry to work with, not that I’m aware of anyway, but it does help to quickly come up with a nice proportioned character. You could even pose it if you set up the base skeleton in a clear way. It is not a lot of work to go from there and create a lowpoly cage to start sculpting, similar to Zbrush. You could give this mesh an armature modifier with automatic weighting, and you’re good to go in different poses as well.
It is only a small test, but maybe some people like this approach… And I can use the extra character to try my new rig. People build 3D character models in various ways, this is an approach (sculpt from a mesh with very simple topology) that I have not done before, so it’s a good thing to try out. I want my rig to work on a lot of different characters.

Quick prototyping of different characters

Building a simple character mesh cage based on the rig's envelopes

Long post, I’m out…
See you later/Довиждане

Michael/Майкъл

I have broken open my previous lowpoly rig, and started to rebuild it. I have a kickass rig which is basically ready to use, and has loads of features, while still being KISS… If you like how stickman, Audine and some of the newer blender 2.5 rigs that are floating on the interwebs handle, you are going to LOVE this…

I could show some images, but I rather wait until the complete rig with animations and characters are, well…. finished…

But I can show the characters I have been modeling to try the new rig with. It is supposed to be really easy to transfer… So I need lots of characters for it to handle. I have modeled 3 new characters for the rig (4 if you count newfella, which uses the old rig) and adjusted proportions and such on 2 old characters I made earlier.

So now I have  2 generic male meshes, 2 generic female meshes, 1 toony character and the newfella character. I’ll refit newfella with the new rig. I actually want to create 2 more characters, and do some sculpting somewhere along the road, but I don’t know if I’ll go that far. The characters are just eyecandy for the rig, after all.

I have to redo the face rig, but I have a clear idea of how to build it. If it works as I hope it does, it will make it much easier to open and close eyes without eyelids intersecting all the time, for example… I have to wait and see, but I think it should behave quite nicely.

I don’t have a lot of time to work on this, so it will probably be done after blender 2.55 is released.

Here are some character images (more after “read the rest of this entry”):

This is how I model my characters

Building a face

A little closer to completion

Two old re-proportioned characters and one new

New characters for the rig to handle!

The fourth generic character; slim girl

Influenced by Epic Mickey and Sonic. There is a reason his elbows and knees are NOT bend in default pose. Generally speaking, that's bad design. But here, I want to try something new.

A little sculpt doodle inbetween.

That’s all, happy blending…