Xmas Catch up

Well Ive just about sobred up from xmas and new years, and I'm now back at uni, I've finally got my laptop back from getting fixed, and just about installed all my programs again.. as you can imagine its been quite frustrating and time consuming, but I think I've got everything back to 'normal'.

Work status :
Ive modelled the bandits body and have been learning about ncloth to use for his shirt, Im actually just waiting for an animation to cache while im writing this so I'll post some results soon.

Theres still a lot I need to do, this week I need to finish El Banditos head and make the blend shapes. And I cant get onto texturing yet as I'd want to use autodesk mudbox for all the displacement maps for the stitching on the shirt and jeans etc, however the mudbox trial is playing up, probably something to do with my graphics card drivers, hopefully get that sorted out this week!

Also Ive been asked to Rig several characters, and we were planning on using a maya plugin called zooCST to make sure all the rigs are the same and as such are much easier to animate all the characters together. I know how to manually create most of the rigging setups that this tool creates, so its not cheating really, like I say, its just to standardise the riggs. As Im using maya 2009 now instead of maya 8.5 Ive not managed to install the plugin yet... hopefully, again, this will be sorted by the end of the week.

and then theres my dissertation!