I got a bit tired of dealing with the stuff for the website and decided to spend time modeling. Really, it’s all stuff that needs to get done so as long as I’m making progress on something, it’s a good week.
I mentioned that I was going to need to work in some time to view some Maya rigging tutorials soon. I decided to have a look at one, just to see how it was going to be. Good thing I did. In the intro to the course there was a shot of the instructor moving the eye lid of the model. This is important because the way I had seen the eye and eye lid being rigged in 3DS Max was that they were separate from the head model and they were actually the eye ball and then the lid was a shell around it but they weren’t seamlessly integrated into the head model. That can work on some model designs if that’s the look you want. I don’t really want that. I would prefer a seamless look and the eye lid actually being a part of the head model and not a separate object. In the shot for the tutorial intro the eye lid was integrated as a seamless part of the head model. So I’ve decided I need to watch the tutorial all the way through and see if that really is how it’s done before I finish up modeling the eye and eye lid parts of both the Worm Guy and the Penguin.
That doesn’t mean I didn’t get any additional modeling done. I did still have
work to do on both models that didn’t involve the eyes. I worked on the Worm Guy. I got his teeth in and made some lip and tongue adjustments. And then I did the cut and mirror part. The cut and mirror took a couple of tries because when I modeled the mouth area I ended up moving some of the center vertices in the x axis some so that they were no longer right at the zero point. What that meant was that when I mirrored and connected, some vertices didn’t merge together and I ended up with gaps. So I had to undo and go in and adjust things. That was a little tricky because of the number of vertices all sitting on top of each other for one reason or another. A
couple of times I thought I had it right so I did the mirror and it looked fine until I did the smooth function and found I had these nice little wells. So I had to undo and go back and fix it again. Finally I got it to work and I think he looks pretty good so far. Here are the work in progress shots for this week. Remember; I’m not doing eyes and eye lids until I finish watching the “Introduction to Rigging in Maya 2017” course on Pluralsight.
Speaking of the Maya rigging tutorial. Wow. What a difference. I’m really enjoying it and feel like I’m getting a little better understanding of some of the why or the theory of rigging. That will be really helpful. I also think I’m going to like rigging in Maya a little better than in 3DS Max. Some of the controls that the instructor is setting up and the way they are setup in Maya is so much more useful and possibly easier. My mind is a little blown about it. That’s a good thing. Well, for Maya anyway, it might not bode well for my use of 3DS Max going forward. We’ll see. The whole course is a little over 7 hours. I’ve got a little over 2 hours left to watch and it looks like the stuff for the eyes is in the last 30 minutes or so. Yes, I could just skip to that and watch it so I could go about modeling the eyes on the Worm Guy and the Penguin. However; from what I’ve seen so far, I have a
feeling I would miss a lot of important stuff and some that could impact my modeling decisions. So I watch a couple more hours, no big deal.
Looking ahead to the rest of this next week it looks like I’ll be finishing up that rigging course and hopefully finishing up or at least working on the last of the modeling for the Worm Guy. I might get back to the Penguin modeling. I have a feeling it might also be time to look for something that covers adding materials to my models in Maya. At least that won’t interfere with finishing the modeling. Who knows, I might find something else to start modeling while I learn how to add materials. I don’t know if I’ll get back to the website stuff this week or not. I might make some progress on that. I still need to call GoDaddy and get more information on what it will take to change the hosting. I guess I could at least to that. Hmm…