Yesterday being a national holiday and all (happy Talboc day!) the whole family was over for the usual family picnic / BBQ. And as a result the house was wall to wall relatives.

And as such I ended up demonstrating some of what I had been up to recently. At least as far as family-safe subject matter, since some of the relatives were of the junior variety. So I pulled out the first clean project I could think of to show it off a bit.

I've been teaching myself master parameter dials in Poser. Everything in Poser is controlled by dials, from rigged skeleton bones to morph targets, to XYZ position and rotation. A master paramater dial lets you control a whole stack of other dials all at the same time. What this means, is that it's very easy to rig something like my dune buggy here with a full working and animatible suspension, by programming one dial to handle all the intricate little pieces of it in one go. Twist one dial and the wheels lower and rotate, while a morph target extends the shock absorbers and swivels the suspension struts.. for example.

So I ended up demonstrating the rigging on the dune buggy by posing it several different ways, and then rendering off a shot of one of them. Tah-dah.

And after I woke up today, and now that everybody's gone home, I added a little smoke, a little film grain, a logo, and some cheesy innuendoes, because sex sells.

Some of the slogans rejected for use were "Feel the road beneath your paws." which was deemed too bland, and "Make the highway your bitch!" which went too far in the other direction.

Anyway... don't try this at home, kids. I'm a professional.