Halcyon Realms - Freedom Project/Otomo/anime

blaue reiter, this wat i tink :
1)yupz, think bone is the best way to animate her ponytail

2)actaully i try out the tutorial for Simcloth but it is the rather easy wan, but i think it is definitely the way to go for clothes, and i think u can afford the cpu power. at the moment i havent look in detail for my clothes, but it is simcloth i ll be using (cos it s free, either this or clothreyes 3 , they r giving away free). i had good comments on Simcloth b4 and a fren demonstrate roughly to mi b4 using it for the oversized shorts of my character. as for whether it is a bad idea for skirt ah, can be done lah, with simcloth. or if u can settle for morphing between 2 or 3 targets, it s fairly believable that the skirt is flowing jus like u see jap anime looping a few keys, but u ve more variation still with morphing. tink u should just anihow make a skirt and do a few morph targets and try it out urself and see that it maybe easier than cloth simulation. but of cos not as impressive.
i still think u ll go for the simcloth look though. maybe u spent sometime figure it out? aniway it is like u learn 1 u learn all. the cloth sim softwares r more or less the same now, logic is same same lor.

3) CS u ll ve to spend time on it. no other ways leh. but the bending stuffs is unavoidable u got to go bck to tweak the model during rigging. and most problems r specific to the peculiar char design. many is brainless meticulous labour, like typing in weights vertex by vertex, no special tools or trick lor.
but main problem now is u havent fix down her design. for ur case, u ve clothings design to help out. cos some clothings types is easier to do than others. oso, u ve intention for her to change costumes in the story? so u noe abt what to do when modelling the joints oready? like more segments and stuffs like this? but even so, it is hard to noe during modelling. i m rigging my hand joints now, oso lotsa tweaking.
i dunnoe how i can help to teach u CS ... demo at ur place? but i m not very sure on biped too.

maybe u ve to give yourself longer time now ... unless u wan to scale down ur story. take it step by step, learn one thing first then the other, dun think u can hurry the learning part, kinda steep curve for u to digest so much 1 go. ever think of going bck on 2D? but if u push on, u ll learn more, whether u succeed a not.