That sounds much more enthusiastic than things actually were. Still it is a new year and a little enthusiasm and optimism to start things off is a good thing. I was optimistic, going into the long weekend that the extra time off would prove to be extremely productive. It was productive, I just don’t know about how ‘extreme’ it was.
I felt like my motivation was pretty low and yet I did manage to work on a few different things. So it’s not like I had no motivation. Maybe, more like, no real direction. I don’t have a deadline for anything I’m currently working on and I don’t have a real drive to get something finished. Though as long as I have been working on rigging Sticks you would think I would just want to get it done. I still made progress on some projects and even started a new one.
I did get a little more of the rigging done for Sticks. I setup the FK controls for the arms. I have a feeling I have a glitch in it that is going to come back to bite me later though. It came about at the point that I had to freeze transforms on either the FK bones or the controls, and I don’t remember which. It’s not a huge glitch. But when I did the freeze transforms the bones shifted just a little so they are no longer in exactly the same space as the main bones. It is fairly minor so maybe it won’t be an issue. Here’s how things look now with the added controls. The screen is starting to get a bit crowded and I still have the wrist and the
hand with fingers to finish up.
I don’t know if you remember that sign for my studio that I started several months ago. I’m still working on it. And I worked on it a bit this last week. You can just see here that I had
some ink drips that needed concealing. They are a little noticeable at the moment. I’m hoping that as I get the piece done they will be less noticeable. I am working to have the lights look a little glow-y and then have the dark background. I’m a little concerned that the word, “Studio”, is going to get lost in the background as I continue so I am planning on going in and adding a lighter colored glow or outline, I’m not sure which yet, to the letters so they will stand out a bit more.
There is an advantage to having large tedious or just repetitive projects to work on. When you have the desire to work on something, but nothing specific calls to you then you can just work on those projects. Cleaning up Greezbly in 3ds Max is working out to be a bit 
like that for me. It’s really a little too overwhelming to try and tackle all at once. And each component looks like it’s going to have its own issues. But, if I do a little at a time then before I know it I will have it done or have the problem solved. So I worked on Greezbly. Or more specifically I worked on the pants that Greezbly is wearing. I was trying to clean up all the extra edges and vertices and then changed tactics. I did make another copy of the pants before I started the new strategy, just in case it didn’t work out. I decided that it might be easier to just delete the messed up faces and the faces that were too dense. Th
en I could recreate the faces, hopefully fewer and more efficiently. So I got all of the offending faces at the waist deleted and the ones at the ankles. Then I tested out my idea for just creating new faces.
It looks like it is going to work ok and I’ve got most of the waist re-constructed. Though it’s not complete. I have the faces re-constructed, I haven’t adjusted them to make everything lay nicely yet. I have to finish recreating the faces in the front of the waist and then I can start adjusting them to re-position them to make the waist band lay against the shirt more smoothly. Here’s a look at the new faces in the pants and what still needs to be done.
Also, here’s a look at how it looks at the moment up against the shirt. You can see the jagged gaps between the shirt and the pants. This is the part, in particular, that I will be needing to fix.
I needed some breaks from working on Greezbly and so I started modeling my robot. The one from the sketch I showed you? Here’s the sketch.
I really like him. I think he turned out to be kind of cute and I should finish him up and give him a body and all that. He’d be great friends with Greezbly and Sticks. So I started working on the robot. I will admit that I have been trying, in my head, to figure out exactly how to go about creating the shape of the robot’s head. I went with a sort of odd look that doesn’t lend itself to being easily created in 3d. Or maybe it does and I’m not going about it right or I’m using the wrong program. Anything is possible. I did manage to get the head shape started and even some of the detail work for it started. I should probably wait for that until I have more of the robot blocked in. But, when you’ve been working on figuring something out sometimes you just have to take it that little bit farther.
I started out with a cube and the free-form 4x4x4 cage (I forget exactly what that modifier is called). It worked ok, though, I think I would have been better off not using it. I got the start of the silhouette and then started on that angled area for the top. This is the part that I was working on in my head. I added some edges to get more the look I wanted instead of it just looking like a concave section. I want it to have crisp angles and look intended and not like it got smashed with a baseball bat. To get it to look the way I wanted I used the cut tool and added several edges so that I could deform the shape with a bit more precision. I
think I could have done that part differently and it might have been easier. I don’t think I’ll try to re-do it now though. Once I had one side of the top part looking about right then I deleted the other half of the cube I started with and mirrored over what I’d done. Then I welded the vertices together and did some tweaking. Then I deleted the bottom half of the cube and mirrored the top to the bottom. This worked out well. I’ve even started a little detailing on the top section.
As you can see, even for low motivation, I was fairly productive. I even managed to get started in Unreal Engine. I’m considering picking up a book for it. I’ve found one that looks pretty good. The only thing I don’t like about the book, well two things, it’s not inexpensive, and it is not available for Kindle for Windows 8.whatever. I can get it on my Windows 7 machine and on my Android devices, as well as my regular Kindle, but that means I have to have a second device/machine to work along with it. Then again, it reads pretty good and looks like it will be good reference so I might just read it through once as a book and then go back to it for reference. I also may not need it. There are a bunch of getting started resources, documentation and tutorials for Unreal Engine right on the website and available through the tutorial button in the engine. That’s what I’ve been
working with so far. So the book may not be strictly neccessary. I mean, I’m already grasping the idea behind blueprints and how to make those work out, and I’ve only been working on learning it for a couple of days. Oh, wait, I’m by no means an expert or
seasoned vetern with them. Still, I get the idea behind them and even one of the things that I would use them for. So it may be easier to get a handle on building in Unreal Engine than I was thinking. That would be good. I’ll share pictures from Unreal when I have something worth showing. Right now, I’m still learning the bits and haven’t actually made anything worth showing yet.
Now that I’m at the end of this post, I see, I really was more productive than I realized. I may not have finished anything but I worked on a few things, and made progress on all of them. I guess my New Year is off to a pretty good start. I hope yours is too.
Check back again next week to find out if I got brave and got Sticks’ wrist rigging done, or what has become of Greezbly’s pants, or if the robot has anymore parts, or even if I’ve managed to create something worth showing in Unreal.