Greetings, all. It has been a rather busy couple of weeks at the Fionn household. First of all, I am happy to announce that the mock trial team that I sponsor won our state competition, and I'm pretty pumped about it. Information can be found at www.tba.org for any interested.

Secondly, I took the family on vacation, and it was amazing. We had a great time, even though the temperatures in Florida this last week were not as accommodating as we would have liked.

But, I digress.

I think I enjoyed this mesh more than any I have done so far because it really hails back to what I enjoy doing the most...glamour styles. Some guys do anime very well, some guys do short cuts, but I loves me some glamour.

Of course, it has the animations and stuff, which look better than New Wave's because there isn't the darkened underlay to the texture.

Here are some things I figgur'd out this time around:

1) As each number next to an assigned mesh part represents a transparency value, you will find that I only used values 15,11, and 13 for this mesh (avoiding 5,7, and 9). This was to maintain consistency of the texture transparency value throughout the mesh. The game has no problem with this, as long as the textures for 5, 7, and 9 are maintained. I am sure that I could edit those in the package file, but I'm not gonna until I'm more comfortable with that format.

2) Too many hairstyles of this ilk look "flat." They appear hollow, with little shape in the inside of the mesh, including my earlier ones. I attempt to rectify this by applying some depth panels to the back of the hair at the bulge of the cranium, down to the end of the mesh. The net effect, I think anyway, is visually pleasing.

3) Animations are hard to do. They consume most of my time. Getting it right is trial and error. Maxis doesn't use the full potential of their available joints, and that's probably because there are some compromises involved. When doing animations, you have to balance an appealing movement with practical use in the game. I ask these questions when doing an animation:

a) Does it appear to have odd breaking points most of the time?
b) Does it look natural; are any movement exaggerations realistic?
c) Is the effect worth it?

That last question is the real kicker: will an animation totally ruin a good hairstyle. I did one a few months back called "Peekaboo," that was a beautiful hairstyle, but the way the animations were applied looked really good about 1/2 of the time. The rest of the time, it looked awful. I have since fixed the animations for myself, but that was a case in which I should have held it back until I had worked it out a little better.

I go for 75%. That's a rough estimate, but I try to take the hair through as many animations as possible, and then get a sense of whether or not the overall impression of the animation is that it would look good in most animated situations. Then, I make tweaks to the joint assignment to compensate for some strangeness, and then do it again. This is the most time-consuming part of the process. I sure as heck hope it is worth it.

Today is my oldest daughter Tara's birthday. She's 9. I'm extremely old.

Fionn