That was sort of a full week. At least it felt like it was. That was probably due to some events at the day job that might end up impacting some of my after day job time. It’s ok it will be a good thing. In addition to that, I did finish up that rigging tutorial for Maya. And the next day Pluralsight released a new tutorial by the same author/instructor covering walk cycles in Maya. That’s kind of exciting to me.
I know, my idea of exciting is a little strange to some. But, here’s why it’s exciting to me. 
One of the things that I let get in the way of working on a Sticks animation was that I wanted, or thought I needed, to figure out how to create a walk cycle for Sticks so that I
didn’t have to animate every single step every time. I figure there has to be a way to create the walk cycle and then set it up so that you can move him along a path and he will automatically walk. I couldn’t find anything for 3DS Max that explained it. Not in the places I was looking, anyway. So to have this tutorial pop up is just cool.
Oh, yeah, I’m becoming a bit of a Maya fan by the way. Between finding a way to create and animate the eyelids the way I want and now the availability of the walk cycle tutorial I’m liking what I can do with it more and more. I haven’t started applying materials yet so that could change things some. But at this point Maya is really becoming my go to. I know I should be able to do all the same stuff in 3DS Max, but they are being presented in a way that they seem so much easier in Maya. I might even import some of my 3DS Max files to Maya so I have the models to work with there.
Watching the rigging tutorial has influenced some of my thinking on how to approach modeling my characters. For a while I was thinking that I need to go back and completely rework the Worm again. I’ve since made a different decision on that. The only reason I was going to rework the Worm was to make it possible to animate the mouth. I’ve decided I won’t worry about the mouth. I will rig the Worm for the body for sure so that I can bend him to the pose I want more easily. And I might rig the eyes. With the rigging tutorial in mind, and because I hadn’t got the beak done on the Penguin I decided to approach the beak in a manner that should make it possible to animate it.
Since I want the beak to be able to be animated on the Penguin I decided to start the beak
over. Instead of using the piece I had started, I hid it, just in case I changed my mind, and took a different approach. I selected some of the faces on the face and extruded them. Instead of adding on to the object already there, I am creating the beak from part of it. I started with the top bill and got it shaped up and then I added the bottom bill. And yes, I had to give it a tongue. The tongue won’t be able to be animated. It will just show up when the mouth is open. I would have to handle it different than I did if I want to animate it and that’s likely to be a little more complicated than what I am prepared for.
I’ve put the work in progress pictures of the Penguin all throughout this post instead of
just putting a bunch of pictures all right together. The last one is the current state of the 
Penguin model. As you can see I’m up to the point of needing to add in the eyes and then work on the eyelids. Yep. I’m going to finally give the poor thing something to see with. Who knows, I might do that with the Worm Guy too.
There is one thing on the Penguin that I’m not going to correct yet. I kind of need it in a T pose because that makes it easier to setup the rig for the arms, or in this case the flippers. I considered fixing it so that I could do that and I probably will later. For now, I don’t really need to animate the Penguin or even change its pose. Later, I might decide to animate it or change its pose and at that point I’ll look into adjusting the flippers to a T pose and then creating a rig.
I think I need to find something on adding materials in Maya really soon. It looks like I might have my models to the point of needing them. And I’m getting close to starting a rig. We’ll see how this week goes and what sort of progress I make. I do want to finish watching the walk cycle tutorial, even though I don’t need it yet, so that could impact the amount of time I have for modeling. It should be fun to see what I get done.