I finished all of the characters I'm going to use in my next animation, and I put up a render in my gallery here. I still need to set up some scenery, but it will be pretty minimalist, since this is a 'toon.

I've also found that Carrara lights don't have everything I want. I'm trying to use shadow buffers for the scene since they render so much faster, but the shadows get too blurred out. I built a rig that has five lights (one for the sun and four for diffuse light coming from the atmosphere) which works okay, but I can't get the color saturation the way I want it. I may have to do some filtering of the video after it's rendered.

I'm also getting specular highlights that I don't want on the underside of objects from my ground bounce light. I really need the light to keep the undersides of the characters from looking they're standing on the moon instead of in air on the Earth. Unfortunately, Carrara doesn't let me turn off specular highlights per light, only in each shader. I don't know if C4D lets you do that, but I bet it does.

I'm going to make some far background props (trees, hills) that are low in detail, and build a creek for the bridge. Then, I'm going to act out some of the animation on video, to get timings the way I want them.

With any luck, I'll be doing actual animating by tomorrow.