The last couple of weeks didn’t go quite as I hoped. I still got to work on many of the things I wanted to, but there was a hiccup or two along the way at the day job that made things interesting. And one of those things will likely continue to make things interesting and possibly challenging. I’ve got art, music, Taekwondo, and Blender to get me through so I’m going to try not to stress over it too much.
The first interesting bit was our monthly patching weekend didn’t go as planned. Most of it did. The general patching was fine and the additional patching I was doing went fine. It was a network patch that made a mess of things and caused our day to go longer as we had to find workarounds for the problem.
The next interesting at the day job was a few days later when I found out that my manager, the only other member on my team, is retiring in a couple of months. While not unexpected it was a surprise. By that I mean, I know how frustrated he’s been with things, and we had a conversation a couple of years ago where I asked if he was just going to quit and go be a bike mechanic. Bicycles that is. One of the first questions I get asked when I tell people about this is, ‘how will that impact me’. Truth is, I don’t know yet. They are still trying to figure out what to do about it and how to get all the stuff he knows from his brain into some form of documentation. For myself, I will be learning a lot more and taking over a lot more. Basically taking in all the information I can get from him.
And while all that craziness at the day job is going on I will still be working on the things I do when I am not working my day job. You know, art, music, Taekwondo, Blender, a few many books, and all that stuff.
With that let’s get to what I’ve worked on since I last posted.
I finished the second character and animation for the Blender course I’m working on. It’s a caterpillar going through a sort of course, through some holes and out of some holes and there is grass and rocks. What I learned on this is how to animate along a path. I animated the caterpillar moving along a path and the camera following along a path. Getting those right was very very fiddly.
Animating the caterpillar along the path was fiddly because it kept turning over and would come out of a hole upside down. Yes, that would be fun, however, that really wasn’t the effect I was going for. So there were lots of key frames to get it just right. The problem with that was that it would then cause the caterpillar to deform a bit. Either squash really funny or stretch really funny. I found that if I made the number of frames along the path fewer, usually by deleting ones in between others, then it wouldn’t get quite as deformed. I left some of the stretching though. It turned out to happen in spots that made it look a little more realistic. That squash and stretch technique is really important in animation so having some of that for this turned out to be a good thing, in my opinion.
Animating the camera along the path was super fiddly. It was so bad that after spending hours on it I deleted the path and just started over. The challenges included trying to angle the camera where it didn’t look off into the void and only looked at the caterpillar and, or the ground plane. That meant there was a lot of stopping, rotating, and setting a key frame. Unfortunately, if you have too many too close together you get this weird loop-de-loop that looks really bad. I did finally get some good key frames and was able to eliminate some of the in between ones and either remove or limit that looping.
The thing about key frames in computer animation is that you set the starting frame, or if you are a programmer, you set the base starting state. Then you go a few frames over and you set the expected desired state, or where and how you want the thing, you are animating to be and look. Then the computer calculates all the changes and how quickly they need to happen and writes the in between frames. This is much the same concept as in hand animation. The difference being that the person doing the in-betweens, the in-betweener, yes that really was a job, decided, at least I think, how many more pictures, or frames, it was going to take to get from base state to desired state.
With the computer, you specify how many frames you want to use and then you set your key frames and different spacings within those frames and the computer then calculates the frames in between. That might be three frames or twenty frames. When you add a key frame in the middle the computer recalculates. If you have too many frames too close with big enough changes, this can give the computer some trouble. Weird things tend to happen.
One of the fun things about computer animation is the way key frames work. Especially, if you don’t have those in-betweening skills. However, you do have to let the computer do the work, and just like with people, you have to give it the room to do the work.
I learned a few things with the modeling as well. Not that there was much modeling for this one. I learned to use the array modifier to add spheres to the caterpillar body so the were connected and I didn’t have to hand place them. I also used the Boolean modifier, which has been around longer than I think I realize, I just never used it much. For this, it was used to create the holes. And we used the particle system to add the grass and the rocks. I’ve used the particle system for this sort of thing before. When I was doing the donut tutorial I used it to create the sprinkles. A couple of things that were different for this project were how the areas that get the particles was determined. This used vertex selection where previously I used a heat map. The vertex selection is a bit more deterministic. Where the heatmap is allows for a little more variation in density. And I used two different particle systems with different vertex selection groups. That was cool.
I did have trouble when I had to go back and remove some vertices from a vertex group. It wasn’t especially intuitive. I finally figured out a method that worked and got the result I wanted, after several tries and a bit of muttering.
I got a little taste of using Node Wrangler which is an add-on for Blender. It is very useful for materials and textures. It is a little picky though. It seems that it prefers to work with .tif files. I tried using some .png and some .jpg files and it would not pick them up properly. That means some of the textures I have, while I can use them, I can’t get Node Wrangler to set them up automatically. That took some work to figure out. And got me to thinking about what resource, or resources I want to use for textures since some sites that were free are not as free as they were, and some of the sites that are still free don’t publish the files in the way Node Wrangler wants them. I’m not rushing to make that decision though. I’ve got another course that is all about the nodes and I may find in that, that I may be able to do a lot as procedural materials instead. I have used materials and textures interchangeably here. There is a difference, I think, I just don’t know it well enough to define it.
So, the caterpillar is done and I’m on to the next character. I’m excited about this one because it is a wooden art mannequin. I’ve modeled one before. It’s been a few years and I used a different program. I’m finding the way this one is modeled to be interesting. I know when I did it so long ago, I really did it the hard way and I remember having a lot of vertex tweaking to do. There is still some of that but not near as much since the base starting shape for the main parts is a cube instead of a sphere or cylinder. And I’m using a lot fewer face because I love the subdivision modifier and can use it later if I want things smoother than the shade smooth feature gives me.
The other fun thing for me about the mannequin project is this sort of modeling and character get me much closer to the type of character I need for my Taekwondo project.
You might remember me mentioning that my sister likes to challenge me with projects. Ok that might not have been what I said. Anyway, before she went on that trip to France she asked me to do something that is a little bit of a stretch. I’ve done this sort of project before, just not in a long time. She has a new venture she is working on, and she needed a logo and asked if I could create one for her. It took some time to get a design that she liked and then a little more time to get it created and looking just right. I think it turned out nice and she likes it. You can also see it on her website, courage takes practice. The good thing about working with my sister is that she doesn’t feel like because we’re family she had to just take what I made. If she wasn’t happy with something she told me so that I could keep working on it and create for her something she could identify with. That’s really important for a logo. And especially if it is a personal or small business venture.
That’s the update for now. I’m off to work on projects so I have something to write about for the next post.
Oh, side note. Twitter. I may not post there as much very soon. They are ending support for the free API that lets my blog automatically post to my Twitter feed so that will likely break soon. If you know someone who you think would like to read this please forward it to them. I will still be posting the notice on Facebook and on Mastodon.