So, things move along, slow but steady. I took some time to optimize the lighting and add soft edges to make lights look flashy.
Right now I am feverishly working on optimizing (read: establishing) an actual workflow so that this tool, should it ever see the light of day (god forbid! After so many broken promises) will actually be useful for people without manually editing xml files. Which means bugfixing. Most of this weekend will be spent on that. And then I’ll move on to walkcycles and the likes. Which make my head hurt a bit. Same with facial animation.
Right now, I cannot get my head around creating a good system for controlling faces without it being too much work on the user’s side. I like the way Muvizu handles eyes! Although I would like people to have more fine-grained control, like placing keyframes or triggering actual sequences (like rolling eyes), and eventually getting all high-level about it – like assigning moods to the face and having it handle these things accordingly with simple commands on a node-level.
But I fail earlier, when constructing the face. Bones and all. I’ll have to think about that one a bit more. Should Face be separate objects or do you have to build in your bone structure for a face in the character itself? Will Bone naming conventions help? What would an interface look like to create Facial animation?

I will also start, from this week, to add in a couple of example characters that represent different visual/illustrative styles, starting with sticky today:

As you can see from the framerate counter, running all the bells and whistles (meaning ambient occlusion and high shadow resolutions) is still going to require a somewhat hefty graphics card. All the development right now is done on an apple MacBook Pro with a GeForce 9600 and 256MB of dedicated graphics memory.