Last week felt really long. I know it was not longer than any other week, same number of hours and some number of days. But as sometimes happens, the amount of stuff that does or doesn’t get packed into those hours and days can make a difference on how long the week feels. Because of this, when I finally got started working on things, I made notes so when I sat down to write this I could more easily remember things to share.
I decided to regroup a little on the Halloween Card. Remember I don’t have a set idea of what I want to make. So instead of working on something specific that may or may not be what I want, I decided that I would start by making a bunch of different things that I
might use for a Halloween scene. Jack’o Lantern, tombstones, creepy fence, spell books, cauldron, skulls or bones, different things like that. My thought is that in the process of creating these items two things happen. First, I add more models to my library. Second, the process of modeling some item may trigger an idea for the card. With that in mind, one of the first things I tried was a tombstone. This like so many things, is not nearly as simple as it seems like it would be. And since I want to create a few different styles, shapes, and conditions for the tombstones, I suspect a few of these may be candidates for some ZBrush treatment. I went ahead and applied a material to this one. I wanted a grey stone or granite but wasn’t patient enough to find one that wasn’t more like a tile pattern. So I went with the pink looking stone. It’s nice. A little tricky to see the letters carved in it with just the default lighting. I figure some spot lighting for actual rendering will be needed if I want it to stand out. We’ll see.
I extruded a loop around the face of the tombstone to give a little detail. I ended up tweaking many of the edges to make them not quite so sharp angled. To get the letters in the face I used the TextPlus tool to create the letters and then selected the face/polygon inside the outline and extruded it. Then I was able to create a compound object and boolean subtract the letters from the tombstone. It did take a little time to get the letters at just the right depth so they looked realistic, or at least not too deep.
In addition to my indecision on the content of the card, another reason for deciding to create a bunch of Halloween bits is that I’ve had another idea or two for the card. Something more elaborate, and possibly even humorous and they require many more parts than what I had originally focused on. With so many ideas and possibilities who knows, I could end up with more than one card for Halloween. That would be cool. And is a little exciting. I still have a lot of work to do though.
I finally gave in and bought a book on 3DS Max 2016. I know 2017 is out, but I’ve barely scratched the surface of what I can do with 2016 and for now, I’m good. It’s because I’ve barely scratched the surface that I got the book. I decided one day to look up creating a walk cycle so that it’s embedded in a character so that I don’t have to animate every single step, only the stuff that’s different. I did my search on the Autodesk site and found some helpful information. Not sure I can make use of it yet. But it was helpful in that it confirmed that what I thought I could do, I can. And it helped me to see that I needed a bit more information on the tools I would be using. So I bought a big ol’ book. It’s a reference guide. It sort of reminds me of the books I had for Autocad and Autolisp way back when. I’ve started reading it. Not just the parts I think I need. I’ve started at the beginning. Maybe view port navigation is basic but there might be a trick or two I can pick up. One thing I have been needing is the ability to zoom back in on what I’m working on when I have managed to get my view point all screwed up and don’t know if I’m just zoomed so far out that it’s a tiny dot or if I’m looking the completely wrong direction. Well there’s a command to get that back and I couldn’t remember it. It’s in this book. Yay.
While I was pondering Halloween Card ideas, and silliness, I came up with another card idea that I think will be fun. At the moment I have two versions of it in mind. Neither are very elaborate but I think they will be fun to create. I may work on them while I work on the Halloween Card.
For my big chunk of working time I decided to make a new Jack’o Lantern. I used all the 
same techniques and tricks as the first one. Though I am starting to use one other thing. For some pieces, I’ve started setting a “Freeze Transforms” on them. That way if I need to move them out of the way or to a different spot for a test scene, then I can Transform to Zero and put them right back where I want them. I’ve done this with the top of the jack’o lantern so that if I Transform to Zero it is as if it is sitting right on the rest of the pumpkin. I’ve also done this with the outer shell and the inner shell of the pumpkin. Though not before I messed up a thing or two. When I was creating the edges for the cutouts, eyes, nose, mouth, at some point in either the attach or detach process I managed to move the inner shell slightly so that not
everything lines up just right any more. I’ve figured out how to work with this without having to remake anything, which is really good because there are a lot more vertices with this jack’o lantern. Still, it seemed like a really good idea to keep from doing it again. Here’s what the new Jack’o Lantern looks like. I’ve still got to properly weld the edges to the inner shell before moving on to the stem.
I know, there are not a lot of pictures this week. Sometimes that happens. I’ll try to do better. I have a whole list of things to model for a Halloween scene. If I can get going on more of those things, I should have lots more pictures of in progress or finished models to share. Keeping that in mind, I think it’s time I get to work on that. Come back next week to see what’s new.