Dan wondered how the population of sea lions at the local zoo kept increasing even though there'd been no records of exotic animal deliveries in the files at city hall. When he decided to stake out the sea lion enclosure that night, he found out he hadn't been the only one who'd been wondering lately... On the bright side, plenty of free fish!

Okay, RL stories: I learned a hard lesson while working on this morph, and that is: you can't rotate something too much without it looking weird. I pretty much got through about 50% of the work on a previous morph using this same picture, but the angle of my head in the human pose was much further downward. Running the morph made the head go teeny-tiny in the middle, like Beetlejuice's head gets at the end of the movie. :P

So after about six or seven hours work, I made the hard decision to scrap it all and start over. It was a real bummer at the time, but after seeing the results of the second effort, I'm happy I did. That's story #1

Story #2: Overall I'm happy with this morph. The head, front flippers and hind flipper in the back turned out really, really well. However, the hind flipper in the front... not so much. It turns out that sea lions actually have pretty substantial front and rear limbs, as you can see from their skeletons: http://www.mccahillfamily.com/Skeleton2web.jpg

The problem is that a significant portion of their limbs are embedded in their teardrop-shaped bodies, which helps decrease drag while swimming. That means it's really tough to map the shape of a human leg to a sea lion hind flipper without resorting to some fancy 3D rendering (which I don't do) to "melt" the limb into the flesh. So you can see in the morph that the hind flipper in the front is never really able to sell the illusion that it's actually attached to the body behind it. It sort of floats above it. A small thing, but I tried dealing with it the best I could!

Anyway, sorry for my rambling. Hope you enjoy the new morph!