The actual Retropolis Rocket Ship scene still looks just like it did in the “Day One” illustration on its Kickstarter page: but that doesn’t mean I’m not already working away on it, as you see here.

Because characters are just about the most time-consuming thing I build I had hoped not to build any new characters for the picture. So I did.

If that makes no sense to you, imagine how I feel.

But in fact the space woman we see here at the left uses several existing bits and pieces that I kitbashed and cobbled together, along with a new head, some spiffy new gauntlets, and that all-important air tank, all of which are at least partly new. Oh! And her helmet, too; that one’s been sitting on my hard drive just waiting for somebody to wear it. Of course, I also made it better.

Those are all the fun parts of building characters: the modeling, texturing and so on. The entirely unfun parts are setting up a skeleton and skinning the mesh to it. This is a task that I do slowly, grudgingly, and not particularly well. Somehow, though, it worked pretty well this time, and much more quickly than usual, too.

I have a backlog of characters I built last year that aren’t rigged and skinned yet. I really need to finish them up. Later.

One curious thing about this woman is that if she took her helmet off you’d see that her hair is black and her complexion’s on the dusky side. That glowing glass faceplate really makes a difference. Like the difference between hijacking a rocket ship and gasping out your last few painful breaths in the dark, illimitable depths of outer space, kind of difference.

Anyway I planned to give this weekend up to the IRS. That hasn’t quite happened yet. I do have untidy piles of papers all over my dining room table, and that’s the first step. I need to get them all shuffled behind me so that I can get to work on the rocket ship scene, hopefully in the morning.