The vacation from the day job is over. It was one of the better stay home vacations I’ve had. I decided not to fight the need to relax and not get anything done and that paid off. By mid-week I was ready to start learning and art-ing. I was also mentally prepared for my Black Belt test. Which was a good thing.
Yes, that Black Belt test I’ve been talking about was this week. It was Saturday. And I passed. I got a new uniform, and plaque and a shiny new belt, in Black with my name on it. I was and still am so excited. I get to wear the uniform and belt to class this week and it’s just so cool. Now to start learning some new stuff, to go with all the old stuff I need to keep current. I’m looking forward to it. I had lots of well wishers and support and it was very much appreciated.
Me with my Master after the Black Belt test.
Before I got to test day, I spent some time watching a few tutorials for Maya. I finally finished the one on texturing. That was helpful since I’ve been having challenges working with Arnold. It just doesn’t handle the way I expect. I’ll get it figured out, I hope. I also started watching a full eleven hour intro to Maya 2017 course. What I’ve learned using ZBrush is that even if I’ve watched a tutorial or course on a topic once and used the program. Sometimes it takes using the program more and watching another tutorial on the topic for it to start to make sense or find a spot in the tool kit. So I think watching this will be much more useful than not. I’m hoping to learn a few things that might make my modeling more efficient.
And yes, I finally got down to working on modeling stuff. I worked on the foot of the FunkyBird. I think I mentioned that I had decided it needed more detailing even though it’s going to be in a boot. This way, if I want to take the boots off, it won’t matter. I’ll have already worked out the look and can proceed with whatever I want to do. To get it where I could work on the detail and adjusting the shape,I added quite a few edge loops particularly for the knuckles. And then I did some shaping. Where I could I did shaping 
by either edge or face but a lot of it was just moving points around. Some areas that needed extra geometry didn’t create full loops, or circles so I ended up just adding the edges by hand, choosing where to place the cuts on the existing edges to make the intersecting vertices. They weren’t always the most tidy looking lines which meant I had to go back and adjust their placement after I got the full line made. I also wanted the top and bottom edges of the foot to be a little softer so I tried to adjust those so once the smoothing is applied they look a little more rounded than squared off.
I was going to start on the wing/arm but couldn’t quite decide how I wanted to approach it that day so I moved on to something else. I finally decided how I want to approach it but I got started on something else while I was thinking about that and then a few things came up so I haven’t gotten back to working that out. That’s next I think.
While I was thinking on how to handle the arm/wing of the FunkyBird I decided to start working on the scene to put the WormGuy in. For starters, the plan is to have him sitting
on one of those long leaves. I have tried once to model it in Maya and a bunch of things went wonky on me. This time it struck me to try it in ZBrush. It’s modeling, and more like sketching so I figured it might be worth a try to see if I could model it there and then take it into Maya. I was able to model a leaf of the general shape and layout I want. I am please with the way it came out. Of course, there is always something I want to be better. For now though, I thought it came out pretty good.
Taking it into Maya didn’t work the way I had hoped. The mesh was really dense. Lots of 
polygons and lots of vertices. I couldn’t have done work with it without first trying to thin it out. Instead of trying that in Maya I went back to ZBrush and used the Decimation Master plugin on it. Basically what the tool does is take the count and layout of the polygons and vertices and tries to keep the shape while it decreases the number of polygons, and vertices, by the percentage that you tell it. It took several passes to get the mesh down so that it wasn’t so dense that when you selected it you just saw a mass of green, you could actually see polygons, finally. Of course to get any kind of a good render in Maya with Arnold I had to add some lights and I added a sort of texture. I finally got the lighting so there wasn’t too much glare or wash out. Even with smoothing turned on, with all that decimation, you can see now the mesh is a bit rougher around the edges of the leaf.
Interestingly, once I tried the leaf in ZBrush and then into Maya, I was able to figure out how to model it in Maya. I started with a cylinder with plenty of divisions along it’s length and on the end caps and was able to do the basic shape development fairly quickly. Then, again, because of Arnold, when I wanted to take a render of it, I had to setup some lights. I decided to use a Skydome light which basically is a large sphere of light that encompasses pretty much everything in the scene, obviously depending on size. For what I work on, it is like putting my model in the middle of a room that all the walls, ceiling, and floor are big
panels of light. The problem with this is that it can eliminate the ability to see much shape detail because the light comes from everywhere so the shadows are nearly non-existent. I had to put a partial box around the leaf so I could see how the shaping was coming along. I also added a camera so I could move around and then always go back to that camera view to have a good comparison. I think I spent more time trying to figure out the box and the camera and light than I did working on the modeling. I’m not done with the modeling, this is still a basic block in. I have refinements I want to make to the transition from leaf to stem and I want to do some more refining on the leaf.
And then I installed 3DS Max 2018 and tried to update the rest of my Autodesk software, 3DS Max 2016 and Maya 2017 on Friday. All I really wanted to do was update my serial number but for some reason, my installation wasn’t going to play along. I spent several
hours on the phone with a technician from Autodesk. I really didn’t want to have to reinstall everything. Unfortunately, that exactly what we had to do for both Maya 2017 and 3DS Max 2016. The technician stayed on the line with me the whole time. But it took up such a large chunk of my day that by the time I got done with that a did the stuff I needed to get done that day, it was approaching dinner time and since I had to be up early the next day for the Black Belt test, there was no point in getting started on anything. I had hoped and planned to get back to things again before I sat down to write this but I haven’t.
In all it was a good vacation. I got most of the rest I needed. At least I got a mental break. I hope I will be more refreshed for the day job. And I got to work on some of the things I have been wanting to work on. I had a chance to learn some stuff. And I had some time to goof off and play video games and watch a few movies. I think it was a success. I’m not sure how the first week back is going to go. I suspect a couple of days are going to be jam packed and I will probably be wiped out and exhausted. Hopefully, with ideas that I’m ready to work through, already in my head, I’ll be able to maintain some momentum. It doesn’t have to be rolling down a steep hill momentum, it can be a nice ease hill momentum. Check back again to find out how that works out.