I have just uploaded 3 turntables - the girl (few little corrections)
and the 2 guards - S fatman and
W fatman
(that's how I call them, from Strong and Weak). They don't have masks (faces) yet, and I'm in no hurry to build that. I want to animate the bodies first, and only later the accessories, like masks or the girl's earrings. Except for the guards' weapons: they need to be animated along with the main body animation, they're part of the key poses. After the animation is done I might try to dress them :) Run some cloth simulation. That would be great if it works (I'm especially worried about the girl, since she's got very wide movement, and her clothing would have to collide with, at least, the chest - this is serious trouble for a cloth simulation). But they would look great with clothes though... more image-composition detail and wilder shapes. And all that cloth extra-movement, in dance, would look awesome. Also, I won't touch any texturing or lighting until the animation is done, and for now I will have a very low-poly version of my environment, the temple-interior. I should probably build the chest in its complete version.
As far as texturing goes, I hope I'll be able to do pretty much everything procedurally. I have some juicy ideas that I can't wait to bring to life - basically, I want to do in 3D what a pencil can do in 2D: homogeneous (minimal) shading. Let me explain a bit. When you draw with, say, pencil on paper, and you have no other drawing tool nor a different color, the end result is monochrome and all the shading is hand-made, like texturing with dots. Simple, minimal, elegant, naturally bringing forward silhouettes and image-composition. Simple/default shading in 3D is pretty much the same thing, except that it looks bad ;) I want to use some sort of consistent texturing, not something that will look 2D, it will be 3D look alright, and I'll try to use very different shading models (I don't like the "everything-looks-like-lambert" stuff...). It's just that all textures will be based on the repetition of the same visual element. Actually, one idea is that everything looks like cloth, for instance, and I have all kinds of cloth, so even the sky and clouds (doesn't apply to my film, no sky, just for the sake of example), water or fire or feathers.... everything is cloth :)
I'll start rigging and weighting my characters tomorrow - well, the rigging will be automatic, thanks to Kaydara :) I just need to draw the skeletons and name the joints right. Yiiiipiiieeeeee! FBIK is the best rig I've ever seen - although I worked with Animanium for a while, and that too is a fantastic rig. Just more limited. I love Animanium because of its clean interface and fabulous FK-IK solution (a pseudo-FK actually, since it's all IK). But it really needs to expand - you can't animate more than one character with it, etc, etc.
So once they're weighted, I guess I'll post some more stuff, some poses. I won't sculpt any body-blendshapes for now, 'cause if I manage to dress them... it would be work in vain. Anyway, I'm trying to get decent deformations through weighting alone. Sufficient for me to animate.