I've left the moose aside for the moment and have moved onto the Canary. The Canary was pretty easy to model, but still it took a couple of tries before getting it right. I ended up using a polygonal sphere, moving lots of points, subdividing the area for the wings. At first I tried modelling the beak in the same model as the body but ended up just creating two half cones and closing the slice. The legs were modelled seperately. All parts were polygonal and then converted to subdivision surfaces.

The IK for the bird is quite simple as well since he doesn't move that much. His legs, wings and beaks, required simple skeleton. His bend is controlled by a cube at his "hips".

The hardest part of animating the canary is something I've struggled with for the moose as well. Using constraints and then turning them off, or on. The moose needed them for holding on to the newspaper, to the phone, to the sofa and to the cigarette. The canary needs the constraint for the cigarette. Its probably the nature of the beast, but it seems to take a lot of tweaking of keyframes to get the switch made from the object being constrained to another object to the object being animated with keyframes ... I don't have an answer other than perseverance.

Now, I have to look at particles again, because the newspaper must catch fire. I decided to take a look at the doc and tutorial again hoping that I could get further along than my first attempt. Low and behold, Softimage has provided sample scenes!! Not only for particles, but there is one that shows how to create the image with an alpha channel! Here is the path: XSIinstallation\Data\XSI_SAMPLES\Scenes\*

I'm looking at the Simulation_Particles_SmallFlame scene right now to see if it will help me make my fire!