The body (except for the hands) isn't really built entirely yet (no legs), and my bro said he should be a little more squat. That's what happens when you forget to bring your reference home with you.
The head shape is just an oval set to iface the camera, everything else moved around in 3D. Took a while to get the ears to work right. The mouths are an interpolated switch layer (although I think I mistakenly deleted a point on one shape, which messes up a few of the transitions), with tweaks to the shape done with a couple of bones. The eyes are another switch layer, with the sublayers acting as masks for the pupils.
The hands are also interpolated switch layers. That was one of the reasons I wrote my mod of the Select Shape tool, being able to order the shapes quickly kept me from just chucking the idea. I made one hand, with fingers, thumb and palm as separate shapes. Then I made a bunch of duplicates of that layer, moving the existing points around to get the shape I wanted. Tthe layer ordering was important, and I had to go back and change the shape depth of the thumb when I was almost done with everything. Some thing I hadn't anticipated is how the interpolation goes in a straight line from point A to point B, so when animating I had to use intermediate poses, e.g. straight from open to fist looked wierd as hell, I had to put the half closed pose in the middle to make it work. The second hans was just a flipped duplicate of the first.
It was actually pretty fun to animate. Took me a lot longer than I thought to set up the character, but once it was done it was really easy to use. The head turning just involved rotating the head group in X and Y. So simple it was hard to believe. I did a short cliip, which is right below. I'm pretty bandwidth challenged, so there's a couple of mirrors. They're only 400K
Quicktime
DivX 5
DivX 5
