Looks great man! A lot better than your very first character =P Hope to see some animation with them soon.
Btw, the boobs on stella might be bit too much. It’s a bit uncanny to me.
Thanks Yoeri! I may tone her breasts down, she has a control setup just for that.
Update on Ben, I’m struggling with the hair, and advice most appreciated.
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Latest and greatest on Ben, really fighting with myself aout the hair. Got a thread in Focused critique open basically begging for suggestions. 
Edit: After much deliberation decided on the curve hair. Ben’s head is done, moving on to the body.
Turntable of the head model: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjUcKp1g6ww
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Moving down. Chest = finished. Basic loops setup for the shirt.
To Do: Shirt, Jacket, Pants, Belt, Shoes, Teeth, Gums, Tongue.
P.S. I’m kinda amazed at the lack of feedback I am getting, looking for positive and/or negative critiques and comments. I opened a thread in focused critique and got 2 comments in 3 days. How can one improve with no input? As an artist, you have to wonder, is it that bad? So awful that you can’t take the time to type “this sucks”? 
Oh well, sorry bout that, just ticked off that I can’t get advice even when I ask for it, and need it desperately.
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Hey, I think the neck is a bit too long, especially from behind. Looking pretty good otherwise, though.
Hey!
This is great.
And you have a good modeling process
Cheers!
@ Grumpy you are so right about that neck, that is definitely intentional, and it is waaay too long…
@ megastor Thank you sir. I am learning a lot, I hope my process helps others.
@ All-
Well things have been really rocking around here!!! BA has been down, but the Train-Toons team has been busy. So much has happened, I’ll have to sum it up. Rendering has switched to Octane. Speed plus quality, I had to abandon my love of Blender Internal. Bye, it’s been swell, and thanks. Hello Octane, you sexy thing.
The simple switch of render engines brought a host of problems. For one, our little two man studio needed a major technical overhaul to handle the graphics cards required by octane. Our little cobbled together render farm, a collection of junk pc’s and laptops…got thrown away. Now, we have only four machines, but all of them sporting dual GTX-470’s, I7’s and 16 GB of Ram. Happy days.
Now all of our machines are networked, and we have a mapped drive on the server with all the files linked in. I think we will have our animation pipeline ready to go in the next few days, you can see the first test using octane in the finished projects section. I’ll leave you with this pic of Stella, all her textures are finally done, and Adam is building an animation library of actions for her right now.
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This is REALLY coming along. It has come a long way from your original models, they look great!
~David
They do look great! Have you started on the scenes or is that after you’ve finished the characters?
I develop characters for training in LMS, I´m using a script that I made in AS2 that use netstream, to make the character, talk, stop, pause, rest, are you going to animate it all…? Or going to automate some parts…? Usually I preload all the flvs and then the course is ready to go, just play the audio and the character do all the rest…
If you need any kind of help, send me a message, here´s a link of a wip, still working on the actions between the rest and talk…
Cheers…
Hey Andre, Mike White here.
I used to be called N00bie. I think I helped you to get started on those scripts, but now you have passed me up in ActionScript knowledge. I will definitely ask for your help if I get stuck.
DMRadford, thanks for the encouragement, It’s needed at this point.
moonwolf-Thanks, I have not started the scenes, I will finish the characters first. The focus will definitely be on them, minimal time will be spent on the set. Planning to use 2d backgrounds whenever possible.
Here’s the clip I posted in Finished Projects, just referencing it here for the record.
Hohohoho, if isn´t Mike, hahaha, yeah I remember you…! So if you need any help, I would love to help…! And about the platform you going to use all videos or some advanced flash and xml, lipsync script…? That´s a lot of work right…? I started that way for the courses remember, then you introduce me to the netstream idea…!
Looks great but the eyes at the very end look creepy!
You could also work on animating more of the face, instead of just the mouth, more of her cheek area
I don’t want to be too harsh on the animation but: was the lipsynch hand keyed or done with some sort of automation based on the audio? So far the animation seems very linear. All the poses and mouth shapes go straight from one to the next with very little, if any, follow through or blending. Perhaps adjusting the timing a tic and smoothing out your curves a bit?
~David
I really like what you’ve accomplished here, working under such a tight schedule. My only crit would be about some of her eye/eyebrow poses in the beginning of the video. She looks a little bit bitter, or scared. I find the final pose really charming by the way.
@andre -I’m not sure how these will be delivered… yet. If I hit any roadblocks I will definitely ask your advice, thanks!
@ moonwolf thanks for the FB! I will work on more cheek movement.
@ DM Feel free to be harsh, yes it is script driven, but the keys are laid out sort of by hand in an app called papagayo. Much tweaking is being done to refine the movement, in the end we will have to accept some problems because it is intended to be “Automated Animation” with a goal of animating a 15 minute episode in under 2 days with one “animator”.
@Wronski Thank you, you’re right on, the expressions are off in this test, just going for extremes to see how the shape keys performed.
Thanks so much for all the feedback! I have been working round the clock, and will have a lot more to show you guys soon.
We have finished testing Stella/putting her through paces, and I think the rig is finally finished. Very unique challenges are presented, setting up the rig so that various idle cycles blend smoothly between keyed actions, and dealing with the basic problem of trying to combine so many pre-made actions. Several bones need their functionality to be duplicated, and automatically overridden when a duplicate control is moved. makes my head hurt just thinking about it. The rig now has 275 bones, I hope it won’t need any more :).
Biggest problem right now is the timeframe, I am starting to get some heat from the client to get this puppy done.
Anyway just to have a picture to post, here is Ben Frank’s current progress.
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3d, I just came across your thread (looking around for posts relating to Octane). It looks like you’ve been going 100 mph for a while now. Keep up the good work. It all looks pretty great.
I’ll be following along to see the progress and possibly chip in some feedback.
Great project ! Your characters are just fantastic.
Wish you all the best. Keep it up.
Blender Cookie uh!?
You*ve convinced me!
Very good works and animations
mmoore- Thanks, I’ll take all the feedback I can get.
Serialsiner-Means alot coming from one with your skills, thanks.
megastor-Thanks, keep it up with Amoo!
@All- Ben is modeled and rigged, texturing still needs tweaking, but he’s looking okay for a first pass.
After all, it’s hard to look good when you are standing next to Stella.
