Make a character dance.

Oto the cleaner has posted up an excellent tutorial on rigging, setting up constraints, weighting and animating a female figure.

The tutorial comes out to be about 14 pages printed and while it doesn't go into a lot of detail within the animation portion of the tutorial, it is an excellent quick walkthrough on setting up a basic rig in Blender.

An excerpt from the tutorial:

More great functions. Blender can now lock bone rotation in the X, Y and Z axis. And Limit it too. There's an example in the image above. You enable the Limit function with the Limit X, Y and Z buttons in the Armature panel ( only available when an IK Solver it's applied to a bones's chain). Then in the "Min:" and the "Max:" fields you set the desired values.

Light sight

What time is it, kids?

It's time to indulge my obscure fannish interest in a character nobody else particularly knows or cares about.

Kimiyo Hoshi, the good Doctor Light appeared in World War III in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo.


I'm happy to see her here for three reasons:

1) Including her in the group, even without any dialogue and at the back of the crowd establishes that she is an active character in the DC universe.

2) She fights Black Adam and doesn't die - always a risk for a female C-list character as it's contractually required that a villain in an event comic has to kill at least one less popular character to show how badass they are because killing millions of innocent bystanders clearly isn't good enough. This time it was Terra who got the bullet, but she goes through lives like a video game character, so it's hard to get too worked up about her.

3) It's the first time we have seen her in action since she was depowered and left for dead. Okay, she's been referred to elsewhere, and cameoed in Birds of Prey in civvies, but this is the first we've seen her powered up. And okay she doesn't fare well against Black Adam, but he was trashing everyone that day.

Fingers crossed, as always, that she gets a more profile gig sometime soon. Just so long as it's not in The Outsiders.

I'd rather be writing about Superman

It gets harder and harder to avoid politics. All week I've been trying to avoid writing about hot topics and controvertial issues; partly because plenty of other feminist comics bloggers have most of the things covered that I want to address, and partly because I want to just write about lighter stuff for a bit.

So I didn't say anything about Joe Quesada's asinine response to criticism of the Heroes for Hire"it was drawn by a woman so it's not sexist" and "It's not a tentacle porn image because I am ignorant of tentacle porn", and entirely fails to address the problem that Misty Knight has been transformed from an african american into a Barbie doll with a tan.

I didn't say anything about the Mary Jane statue, although I have been irritated that so many people seem to have missed the point and that the issue is not about the dumb statue but the huge and vicious overreaction toward anyone that complained about it.

Right now I'd be far happier reading a fifty year old spy novel for a review I want to do (why am I wanting to review a fifty year old spy novel? Wait and see) and writing about silver age nonsense that makes me happy, and then I hear about some tiny pressure group, possibly only a couple of people, who are persuading LiveJournal to censor their users to a degree that they are throwing out baby, bathwater, and most of the bathroom plumbing in a crazed putsch that is destroying years' worth of literary criticism, fan fiction, and valid discussion entirely unrelated to the "child porn" scare card they are playing.

Always remember, "Freedom of Speech" means the freedom to voice an opinion that disagrees with you. It doesn't matter if it's wrong, or it's bad, or it's "unamerican". Once you start telling anyone they can't have a different opinion then speech is no longer free. cover that has been in the news lately, even though a lot of it seems to be

Where, Oh, Where?

Hi everyone. We’re undergoing some restructuring over here at Yeti HQ. More updates to come. Problem is … is that where’d all the great music go? Is it just me or did 2007 begin with a bang and then mostly dry up. I don’t even know what to listen to anymore. My inbox doesn’t help because it's all FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE. Even my mom is sending press releases now. When I do read me mail, I get, "Yo, I've sent you 4 emails, why don't you respond?!" Delete, delete, delete.

So... ummm... yeah... what's new with you? What’s everyone been listening to? Thermals? Handsome Furs album is pretty good, as well as the Shout Out Louds out on import [or torrent … you pirates]. What else is there?

Well, I’m off to read some blogs now. Or, failing that, work