I don’t have a snappy title for this week. I didn’t have that snappy a week. It wasn’t bad. Just not snappy. I got zapped by allergies of some sort pretty good and spent most of the week feeling less than stellar. I did not let that get in the way of receiving my red belt at Tae Kwon Do. It’s easy to kick things and yell, it’s a little harder to concentrate on making things when you feel like you’re drowning and your head is pounding. Fortunately, all that started to let up at the end of the week and I was finally able to get some work done. Oh, and see a couple of movies.
This summer/year has a lot of, what look like, good movies coming out and some that have already opened. I’ve seen a few of those that are already out, Zootopia, Captain America: Civil War, X-Men: Apocalypse, that I can remember. This weekend I saw Warcraft and
Now You See Me 2.
I did like Warcraft. I can’t really rave about it. I enjoyed it. I might see it again just not in the theater. What I found most interesting were the Orcs and some of the rest of the cool art stuff. I have seen a couple of things on Twitter about some of the art and props and such for Warcraft. I think it would be interesting to read about. I know some of the crowd work must have been computer generated, I’m just not sure about the Orcs. I’m not sure if they were prosthetics or mo-cap. Maybe some of both. I liked the look of the Orcs. I thought they did a nice job. I really liked the tusks and the bands and rings in them. That was great.
Now You See Me 2 is the follow up to Now You See Me. It’s always a challenge to follow up such a well done movie with a sequel. I loved Now You See Me. I thought the ending was excellent. Very mind blowing. That doesn’t mean I didn’t like Now You See Me 2. I did. Very much. In fact, as much as I liked the first one and think it so well done, it is possible that this one has out done it. For me there weren’t any of those mind blowing moments, like in the first one, with an ending you just didn’t see coming. However, in the second one, the ending wasn’t predictable, and even adds a new twist to the first movie. I think the fact that I’m still puzzling over bits of it says a lot.
In between movies, and once I was finally feeling better, I worked on the worm guy again this week. I have something in mind for him and want to get it done so right now I’m focusing on getting him done.
I was ready to delete the half that I hadn’t put much work into and then mirror the other half over. I looked at him and thought about, if there was anything missing that I was going to need to add for both sides, or adjust for both sides, because if there was then I should do that before I do the mirror. I had a couple of things that needed taking care of.
First, I added an antenna. Ultimately, I’m going to want the antenna sort of bent over a bit and maybe at an odd angle, but I created it rod straight. I’m going to rig it when I rig the rest of the worm guy. If I do that, then like with posing the rest of the worm, I should be able to keep the pinching and stretching when I pose the antenna to a minimum.
To make the antenna I used a cone with really small radii and made sure to have lots of segments for the length so that there will be more to work with for posing. I also made sure to have several cap segments so that there would be plenty to work with for the
top bud part. For that top bud part, I selected polygons and scaled them out and added and edge loop or two for a bit more control and shape. Connecting it to the head was a little tricky since I had 16 segments around and it was going into a quad. To get a nice flow I used the cut tool and created a few triangles to add a few more points so that many sides didn’t have to be condensed down to just 4 sides. I wanted to maintain some of the smoother look. It worked out.
The other modeling bit that I did was to clean up the bottom or end part of the ridge for the underbelly. When I created the ridge separation I did it along polygons so that very end bit was just a straight squared off segment. I manipulated points to make it a bit more rounded looking.
With those things done it was time to delete the other half. Because the worm guy is so tall I did this in segments so I could zoom in and not get more polygons than I wanted. This wasn’t too bad. I just did a window select of an area and then a delete, after I made sure I didn’t have extra polygons selected. The catch to this was the edge of polygons that were created when I did the extrude on the body to create the difference between the under belly and the rest of the body. I wanted to keep part of the loop of polygons so using a loop selection wasn’t going to be ideal. Since I knew what I wanted, I just selected them click by click and then deleted them. Here’s some of the edge selected before I deleted it.
With that, I now have half a worm guy. I saved it and then saved it to a different file before I do the mirroring and put it back together. The reason for this has to do with adding arms. Since I haven’t decided if I want to give him arms yet, this way I have the base. I can work on him without arms and see how I like him and then, if I want to go in and give him an arm or two on each side I don’t have to start over. I just add to the one side and then do the mirroring. Then I do all the other stuff I will now have to do for this guy.
Next up for the worm guy is to mirror the one half and then fuse him together. From there I have the rigging and texturing to do. I’m not sure if it will be easier to texture first or rig first. I’ll need to figure that out. And I’ll need to decide how I want to go about the texturing. I saw that Substance Painter 2.1 is out so maybe I’ll give that a try. I’m sure I’ll have lots to tell about that.