SO, essentially

I've decided to get back to doing 3D graphical things for fun and as a stress relief valve for all the political goings on, and starting to get a taste of commuting with all the trips to Montpelier.

Anywho, I'll give you a brief visual history of playing with milkshape 3d  and model skeletons (which is a different ballgame then the lit scenes I enjoy making in CADkey or the occasional static item/plant model).

first, outcome of me playing with the CS GIRL tutorial before I got frustrated with rigging the skeleton to my slightly different than instructed model.
For this one I started with the gsg9 skeleton from Counter Strike and did some drawing around it:

Not too shabby IMHO, although he obviously needs a little work.
And then an upclose face drawn from scratch:


Then I moved on to skinning:







Anyhow, it was right about here, when I started attaching the skeleton to the mesh that I got frustrated (back in August), and put it on hold for a while:



Then, about a 2 months ago, a friend asked me to make a model of a lego person, with separable body parts, for him to use with Panda3d, and after playing around with skinning the model it renewed my interest in some older ideas I had for projects.
Which brings us to last week. Browsed around on google images, found a diagram of a dragonfly, and after 2 or 3 hours, voila:



Fired up LithUnwrap, did each group/bodypart as a separate UV mapping, and skinned them one at a time:


Finally, I rigged the skeleton and started animating the legs. The wings weren't rotating properly, so those are on hold, but here he is:



Finally, coming to my latest project, similar to the last one, but with a shorter name, and WAYYY more complex skeleton. Also, The only good reference image I could find was from one view only so I decided to do the skeleton first to get a good sense of depth before I started the concept art + the mesh:


I'll keep you all informed as he progresses.