I've added a link icon to the folks at Need To Know back there on the front page. They're the bless-poppets who sorted me this server when Demon kicked me out. I fiddled around to try to come up with a link icon that would fit into the front page design while stylistically reflecting the NTK site. What I actually seem to have come up with is a tired overused .gag which appears to proclaim 'I am a corporate whore'. Trust me, that's my button. I'll never put banner ads or other irrelevant shite on these pages.

I know, I know, I haven't updated in ages. This project was taking over a frightening amount of my time, and, coupled with the disappointments of the second season, I thought I needed a break.
So, since I've been feeling guilty about starving you of your Tubbie- fix, here's a rotoscoped Dipsy. Plenty more where that came from.

The results are in from the first complete month of stats- collecting on these pages - September saw over 14,000 visitors. I'm not sure how impressive a figure that is on the Web scale of things - if anyone has a Beaufort Scale for traffic on non-commercial web sites, I'd like to see it. Still, it's about twice the population of the town where I was born, and that's a lot of slack-jawed yokels.

Gon out. Backson. Bisy. Backson.

Season 2 has started, and it sucks. Laa Laa sitting on a hillock explaining how to count to three in minute detail, without anything going awry. I mean, what is this? Barney the Bloody Dinosaur?

Dave Thompson no longer appears on the credits, and I got my first look at Simon Shelton walking around. It just looks like a grown man in a large furry suit. I'm sorry, but there's more to appearing childlike than putting on the costume. When he walks, he is simply moving about as if the costume weren't there. You look at an old pro like Dipsy, and he's bouncing in time with the latex - you get the sense that that costume has real weight. His movements are to scale. Tinky Winky is bloke dragging a silly fur suit around after him.

Laa Laa also seemed to be enunciating her gibberish - a classic British compromise in that it pisses off both those who liked it as it was, and those who wanted adult speech.

Where was that special something? None of this episode made me giggle with glee. I hope this isn't representative of the whole series.

Oh, and when Laa Laa was singing on the hillock, you could quite clearly see Ms. Smedley's face inside through the mouth. There was the reflection of what I assume were her glases seen for several frames.

The All-New Teletubbies FAQ has been instigated, and installed in its new official home on this here website. It hasn't even got to version 1.0 yet, but it's looking good. I think.

Finally got round to updating my Tubbielinks page. There are fewer sites there now, but the ones that are left are required browsing.

I left the PC rendering an animated sequence featuring the Noo Noo for about an hour, only to discover that, because I'm an idiot, the texture mapping was all wrong and he looked like he'd been dipped in tar. I guess I shouldn't do so much of my work on this site while I'm drunk.

After a busy weekend's hard 3D Studioing, there are all sorts of goodies on the site ready to be nicked by lazy unscrupulous students. The periscope is now texture-mapped, although given that there are still some subtleties in the art of surface maps with which I'm unfamiliar, I'll probably be going back to it.
I've put up the plain non-texture-mapped Tubbietoaster in order to see how well it'll sit in the site. I've learnt my lesson from putting up the unfinished periscope, and scribbled text all over the image. It's really horrid seeing my rough unfinished work escaping off to other websites, where it'll continue to haunt me for the rest of my days. At least wait till the pictures are finished before taking them. Oh, and don't take them.
The Noo Noo is even less finished, but there's just enough of the little fellow for its personality to start showing through, so I've included a quick render of that too.
I also took a little time out to make that piece of tubbietoast which is bopping away at the start of this piece. For something created entirely from scratch, it does look very convincingly real. If the BBC doesn't like it, I'll have to send them the project file so that they can see how crude the 2D surface map really is. I haven't scribbled over it. Sometimes you just have to accept the inevitable.

There are some 2D additions too. I finally redid the illegal 'Secret Footage' images - removing the cut-and-pasted Teletubbies, and drawing my own versions in. This was easy enough with the Planet of the Apes image and the Bigfoot image since they require small indistinct characters. The Star Wars image was probably beyond me, so I went for a slightly different route.

Oh sod it, let's have another bang on that bouncing tubbietoast. I just can't get enough of it. (Moose starts dancing around singing 'tubbietoast, tubbietoast')

I haven't forgotten you. There may not be much going on with the visible part of the site, but that's because I'm frantically trying to knock the 3d models into shape so that I can replace all of the old BBC copyright material. The periscope just needs texture mapping, and the house just needs its slide, and internal texture mapping. The Noo Noo is giving me real headaches, and I keep starting him again. Beds, tubbie-toaster and tubbie-tustard machine are little more than blobs.

I'm no expert at this sort of thing, but I'm certainly learning from the experience. It can be pretty slow work, though. When I'm happy with the meshes, I'll make them available for everyone to use in creating their own rendered scenes. I'm still not sure what to do about the Teletubbies themselves. Perhaps Fractal Design's Poser would be the tool to use there.

I'm being hindered in this work by the fact that my car is off the road at the moment, forcing me to use the train, and shaving a couple of hours off the time available for working on the models. It's been a while since I've used the train - they've taken to playing waltzes at tinny low volume over the station tannoy, which just makes me think of cattle trucks and gas chambers. Scary.

A new home!

Yesterday's News is tomorrow's fish nuh chip paper. But what is it today?

Again!