Some of which are for an intended children's animation, I have quite a few characters for this:

GreenPea, SnowPea, BlooPea, BeanPole, Susan the Black-Eyed Pea, & FrozenPea are all done in 3D, with yet to do: Pea-Brain, Ha-Pea, BeefCake, SweetPea, (the Princess) Pea-Tar The Great (The King), and Pinto, the King's Master Spy.

Here's a pic of the latest character to be modelled in 3d: FrozenPea, FrozenPea is a little smaller than the other Peas, and she suffers from shyness, and is rather timid.

Frozen Pea is a lovely little girl...  I can see that she is s little shy and a bit curious... and oh so chilly!...  I love where she is hanging out... a very interesting place, for sure.  She finds it interesting as well, and wonders what the rest of the World is like... as she starts to thaw, she feels that her natural green color is coming back to her face and she feels more relaxed and less uptight.  I look forward to seeing all the others from your pod.

Steve

His natural colour is blue but he's paler than FrozenPea, who needs the ice cap she wears to keep her temperature cold.

BeanPole tries to be supportive and helpful - his movements are a little jerky.

BlooPea is a bit of a bumbler, accident prone with a bubbly but slightly anxious personality.

Susan is always dancing, she is a Mardigras kind of person.

BeefCake, Ha-Pea, PeaBrain, SweetPea, (the Princess) Pea-Tar The Great, The King of Pealand, and Pinto the King's Master Spy.

The only one I haven't mentioned yet, is GreenPea, you can see him standing next to Susan in her petalled shirt.

GreenPea was the first one modelled and is the main character - at least in the first story from Pealand.

I love them, Fran, they are gorgeous! :-)

Corrie

I think your taking the pea, Fran!!  Lots of fun and very well done!

I have lots more modelling to do, like a P-Pod - does a similar job to an iPod, but it's a different shape, and there's the Pea-See, just sketches as yet:

Then there's 'The Pulse' - no sketch yet.  But I think it's a Night Club.

These are absolutely amazing!  I don't know a kid in the world who wouldn't love to hear a story about these characters.

what Willie just said....really appeal to the kid in me for sure.....

You're very kind.

I'm working on Pinto at the moment, I've got him modelled but I want to pose him before I post an image of him... I'm just not sure how to rig him as the tut I followed for rigging FrozenPea only did rigging legs, and Pinto has legs AND arms... and I'm not sure how to do those as well.

He'll give off a totally different vibe posed, to what he does now in the standard position.  I don't like it!!!

Lol..they adorable! Yup.. a kiddo would love them. Plans on 3d printing or making prototypes of them? 

Well if I win the lottery, sure. Lol.

(But otherwise I just couldn't afford it.)

I'm still studying videos of how to rig at the moment.  I've found some for Carrara but it's taking forever to learn how to use Carrara, so I may not go that route.  (plus there are some other limitations in Carrara.)

I've also found some rigging tutorials for Blender - and Blender has certainly changed since I first tried (and failed) to learn it, some things are a little bit easier in it now.

But I think I need a crib sheet on how to first set up the scene: views, camera, lighting, materials, render settings - before you even start.

However there's something called 'Rigify' for Blender, which seems (from the videos) to make rigging in Blender much, much easier.  And as I like the new Cycles render engine, plus there's some intriging sounding possibilities in 'Physics' for Blender now, I may go that route for the actual animation.

I'd still like to be able to animate in Bryce, but I don't know if rigs are useable in Bryce, wherever they are made. I know that some are - because I've used a 'posable chain' in Bryce - dunno who made it, it was a long time ago now.

I've thought about DazStudio, but again there are limitations in there...

Fran, as a user of both (although Bryce being more in the form of history rather than current), I can say Blender rigging and animation tools are excellent. Pretty much on a par with the base rigging of something like 3ds Max (although the 3ds Max biped is something fantastic to play with - basically a pre-made human rig).

Blender does take a bit of getting used to - the latest release 2.7 series changes the UI slightly again but it is probably more newb friendly than it used used to be. Take a look at Blender Nation and or Blender NEwb to Pro for good tuts. 

I haven't tried rigify because I find the out of the box rigging system to be pretty strong.

And yes, all the sims (physics / smoke / particles / fluids) are great. As well as cycles I also use Luxrender which is awesome for photo real work (think maxwell render). If you don't mind paying Indigo render is also a good equivalent to Maxwell (better than Lux but costs a fair bit). For animation I tend to drop back to blender internal it's still pretty powerful and faster to render an animation sequence than Cycles (unless you have a god like nVidia graphics card.)

The biggest thing to conquer with Blender is getting used to all the keyboard shortcuts.

Loving the Peas by the way - I can see some good stories being created with them!