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After putting some hours into making the inventory pegasus/moose into a donkey, and adding tufts of hair, this little inspiration came.

The "Question Donkey" has some tricky aspects. For instance, the writing: how to address societal issues compassionately? Henson, as far as I know, steered far from the tightrope obstacle course of political humor. Politics -- or rather, expediting life priorities -- is possibly do-able, if the right tension is released. The rule-breaking system of comedy is to remind one of an association, and then dissolve it, by redistributing the attention to dissolve the harm it threatens. The chief lies/fears of politics seem to have to do with "budgetting," "unacceptable risk," "cost over-runs" and "loyalty." In other words, all of the things that Christians are not supposed to sweat about.

How does one make fun of "loyalty?" In another project, I had an "Ultra Top Secret" courier, who was constantly being shot at by the good guys, because anything that secret is just WRONG! Unity and loyalty are NOT virtues, as anyone who's watched Nuremberg movies will attest. Unity is another name for "personality." Principle before personality.

INSPIRE is powerful; no question about it. This design of character rig uses bones for the mouths and neck movement, and morph targets for the eye movement. And, oh yes, the character can also walk around and do a thousand-and-one other things.

This character actually had a dozen or so spare edge lines that seem to pop-up when aggressive welding or metanurbing is done. They were removed by observing in the shaded window, where they seemed to be, then selecting all of the polygons in the area, and de-selecting the affected polygons by dragging the cursor across edges that did not appear to be affected. Oooops. Actually, the correct way was to remove these artifacts is to go to the Diplay menu in Modeller, than open "Statistics" in the Polygon mode (not points), and press "+" for the "2 vertices" entry, and then "Cut." It's that simple.

Adding bones to this character turned out to be a positive experience, first of all because the bones were already in place for the moose. And second of all, because I had the courage/patience to adjust the strength and falloff of the bones and just keeping hammering away at them until they worked. The falloff proximity for the lower legs wound up being 1/Distance^16 and the strength ranged from 333% to 2222%. This was before I got some instruction from Larry Schultz of www.splinegod.com ; check out his website.

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