Don't be afraid to kill your children.

It was all going well. I had Malcolm all set up and textured. I'd put his number on him and even put a hat on him! Even parenting them went well! (Yeah, this is all simple stuff but usually when you are new to a 3D software little things go wrong all the time for seemingly no reason.)

But then, I select the head control to test the parenting of the hat to Malcolm's head and all hell breaks loose! Maya crashed and wouldn't open the file without crashing. Raf tried to help and two other lads in the room tried to help. We were an army against Maya, trying to get this file to work! They re-arranged the files, tried to run them from the C: drive and all sorts. It ended up working with all the scene files separated on the desktop. But then, because of what I posted before about Malcolm's script files, the controls for Malcolm wouldn't work.

So I killed the child. I started again for probably the fourth time now. This time, taking another classmate's advice, instead of referencing the Malcolm model into a scene file, I imported the scene into Malcolm's file. So far so good.

It's not a complete waste of time though, I'm learning a lot!

Managed to catch up though. There are certain ways I have to work with it though. Must import the script files before opening Maya so that the control picker will work. Malcolm has a smoothing option on the control picker but it slows down the program A LOT, so I've textured it on smoothing option 1 and will work on it inc. animating on option 0. I think that's all.

Here's an up to date picture of Jim, now with hat and number. We've changed the colour palette a bit too, the other Rachel made the changes after our tutor spotted her sketchbook cover and thought the colours were really nice and suggested we use a similar palette for our scene!

Should be able to start blocking tomorrow. Key pose sketches to come.

**EDIT - Just noticed the background (or at least the curtain) has not rendered in the picture. No idea why but it will be fixed.