In case you missed it, last week was the Christmas Holiday. I had both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day off from the day job which made for a really nice 4 day weekend. I did my best to do very little of significance during that time. I was not entirely successful in that. I ended up doing a little work on Sticks and on Greezbly.
Sticks got a few more rigging steps but not much of it is worth seeing pictures of, unless you want to see the configuration screens. I’ll try to remember to get some shots of them for next time. For now, here is a shot of the arm control that I set up.
This is to make it easier to move the arm. It is attached to the IK goal which is really small and difficult to select. With this it will be easier to select. And it is attached to the global control so that it will move and scale with everything else. I did get several other configuration steps done, including adding a swivel control for the elbows.
Greezbly got some treatment in 3DS Max. ZBrush has a plugin called GoZ that aids in exporting models to other programs such as Cinema 4D, Maya, Photoshop, and 3DS Max. Since I think I want to try to animate Greezbly at some point I want it in a program that
I’m comfortable with rigging and animating. Ok. I’m not 100% there yet but I’m farther along in 3DS Max than any of the other possible programs. So I decided I should try to send Greezbly over to 3DS Max from ZBrush. It took a couple of tries. I didn’t get all the sub-tools the first time. Once I did get all the sub-tools I set up some lights and took a nice picture. This is another reason I want to try to use 3DS Max for Greezbly. I like my lighting options better.
The only thing about the Greezbly model is that it has a lot of polygons and so it’s a bit dense for creating UV’s and if there is anything I want to adjust. Here’s a shot of all the pieces of the model in wire-frame mode so you can see just how dense the mesh is.
I tried using the Decimation Master in ZBrush to see if that would work. It didn’t look very good even in ZBrush so I didn’t try to re-send the model that way. I tried the Optimizer modifier in 3DS Max. That did some really ugly things. It took all my lovely quads and made them an annoying ugly combination of quads and tris and I’m not sure what else. This won’t work for texturing. Things will look awful. I even tried the Pro Optimizer modifier and didn’t have any better luck with that.
As you can see there are some areas on the pants, at the waist, in particular that look like they might be part of what is making the optimizer go all crazy. There is also the issue of these additional mesh edges. At first I thought they were artifacts. It turns out they are not. They are the interior mesh of the pants poking through. Apparently I got a few areas a bit thin.
So back to those messy areas. I decided to start trying to thin them out myself and then I can reconstruct the mesh. The rest of the mesh around those areas are really nice quads and so once I thin things out and get rid of the ugliness I can recreate the using the create edge tool and connecting the appropriate vertices. I need to do this at the waist and at the ankles for the pants. I have a feeling I’m going to have to do something similar for the shirt and boots. I haven’t looked into it yet. The ankles of the pants weren’t too bad. I basically just cut them off. But I ended up with some rogue vertices that I have to figure out what to do about. Still it was faster than cleaning up the waist. Which I am still doing. Here a before and after of the ankles and also a before of the waist and a look at what I’ve done so far.
I did check to see what was happening to the model as I did this. It can be difficult to tell when you are looking at the wire-frame so I took a before and as of now shot of the waist area.
Greezbly and Sticks weren’t the only things I worked on. Though Greezbly sure got the most time, at least over the weekend. I also started a scene that I’ve had in my head for a while. I think the lighting is what will be most important for it but there is a lot that needs to be in place to make the lighting behave correctly. So I started putting pieces in place and began the first pass of basic details. I was inspired to work on it after playing Disney Infinity 3.0.
I like Disney Infinity 3.0. It’s a lot of fun. And I really like the idea of the Toy Box creation tools and all that. But as I have gotten farther into it, at least with the decorating and expanding of my INterior, it is and feels, a bit limited. Now there is a lot of stuff that can be done and I still look forward to figuring out how to set up the different games and challenges. However, there is more I want to do than I can do in the Toy Box. Which means I am going to have to start figuring out something like Unreal Engine or Unity to build an interactive world. At this point, I’m pretty sure I’m going to work with Unreal Engine. Now I’ve got to start learning it.
So it looks like all that trying to do nothing of significance wasn’t entirely successful. Or maybe it was. It certainly helped me find a bit of motivation to start working on things I had not got to yet. So check back next week when we will be in the early days of a New Year and find out if I’ve managed to make more progress or do nothing of significance.
For those of you attending parties and what not, please be safe. And Happy New Year.