Troy

Thanks man.

I use Unlimited at work and still dont use cloth, time is money!!

I sometimes create Blend shapes for movement on the sleeves or if a character bends to and fro so the 'cloth falls accordingly so its just driven by the joint movemnt in the rig.

The reference for my Characters are either photos of friends and colleagues and the Aliens are sketches that I do myself. You can see some over at my site. I still have loads to scan and get on there.

As for the meshes, its been a long haul to get to to where Im going. It took me a couple of goes to dig the looping theory, but as long as you understand the basics of underlying muscles in the face they are actually edge looped themselves in a way so if you can see this then you just apply it to your model. Then once you get down to facial expressions the job of contorting is made easy as it follows naturally. I think the first head I did was a tutorial called Joan Of Arc by a french 3d dude called Michel Rogier. This was a while ago now. He built it in Max but I just used Maya so..but because he built it one poly at a time, by extruding edges it was too much time taken up. Buch I found some other stuff by Bay Raitt (Gollum Modeller extraordinaire) and also renowned female modeller Steve Stahlberg and studied their methods with loops etc and then came up with my own way after hours and hours of practice. So now I have my own loop theory.

Hope this helps. I am thinking of doing some eye opener tutes to make stuff easy for everyone. Not to the point of SM with video etc but just some simple intuitive ways to speed up the work flow and not bog people down with the techy stuff. Just to the point.

Later

_jay