#also haven't yet played with settings so my final showoff of things will have a better wireframe layer - though the cactus face is dense

[cjgladback]

[ID: First GIF is a turnaround of a stylized scorpion walking quickly with a potted cactus character sitting on its back, the camera orbiting around to show all sides of the cactus' wooden chair and luggage including a large corked terracotta jar, a leather-wrapped metal canteen, a small but stuffed cloth sack, and a green blanket folded and fastened with a belt around a cane's shaft leaving the cane's handle visible.

Second GIF is the same walk cycle shown from the characters' forward right, while everything jiggles the most dramatic movement other than the scorpion's legs are the cords with dangling gems that swing from the spokes of a wood and cloth umbrella tied to the scorpion's stinger.

The third GIF is the same as the second but with the wireframes of the 3D objects overlaid in dark purple. End ID]

I'm calling these characters done! All items in the character and prop sections of my to-do list are crossed off. Except technically one line saying to err on the side of pink for the flower if/when I change the lighting, and if I have good reason to view the umbrella too long I'll add some handwavy stitching to explain how that fabric's fastened to the spokes--but no! They're done. I'm pretty happy with the balance I struck between a one-to-one recreation of Nicholas Kole's lovely designs and a more tactile and riggable setup that one might call my style.

So now there's the environment. I've made one layer of what I hope to be a three-layered ground material (cracked clay melding into sand based on proximity to things that can't just be sitting on cracked clay but won't have to be run over). And in stream yesterday I made the leaves and modified the geonodes from the flower to be the shapes of aloe, agave, and yucca. Still to be determined whether the agave will get flowers--it's so many unnecessary vertices and I'll have to see if they'd even be visible in the storyboard or always out of frame, but stalks' flower clusters would be such a cool echo of both the umbrella-on-stinger shape and the cloud cluster shapes I intend if we are going to see the sky.