I hope.
That’s for the test for the day job that I have to take. I’m almost to it. I have it scheduled for Wednesday morning this week. I’ve been studying and will study up to the last minute. I’m really hoping to pass.
Even with that, I did manage to test out a few things in the 3D modeling world. I was able to export Walter, the Worm Guy from Maya and import him into 3DS Max 2018. He came over with his materials and even his rig. Because his rig came over I was able to get a render of him in his pose using the new Mental Ray. As I was remembering how to move around in 3DS Max, I either moved something unintentionally or found a small issue with the rig and mesh setup. I’m not sure the rig stayed skinned to the mesh. I would have to go back to Sticks to test it out, but I think it broke in the move. It’s kind of ok though. To get it to bend the way I wanted to begin with I used an IK solver and had to start at the tail instead of the head. So it’s a little backwards. I may be able to use an FK solver and start at the head and get what I want. I’m going to try it. For that, instead of deleting the rig I just exported a copy of Walter from a file I saved before I added his rig. Now I’ve got Walter with his materials and no bones or rig so that I will start fresh. That could be interesting.
I also exported Funkatmyer. That Funky Bird is really going to need to be in the picture for the holiday card. So I exported all of him and his accessories from Maya to 3DS Max 2018. I went to render him the first time, using Mental Ray, and got a bunch of errors about his normals. So after poking around, deleting some dummy objects, and such I found where I could apply a modifier that would basically fix all the normals. So I applied it to everything that came up with funky normals, collapsed it down to the object and then rendered again and that fixed it all. I think. I haven’t applied any materials yet. That will be the real test.
I also found, while playing with Funkatmyer, that either, there has been an improvement to the TurboSmooth modifier or I missed something. You know how I was saying that in Maya, with Arnold as the renderer you can set it so that the smoothing happens at rendering, and even Blender has that. In Blender it’s a smoothing modifier and you tell it how many iterations for the scene while you are working and you tell it how many iterations for rendering. It’s a feature I think is really cool, and useful. Well I found it in 3DS Max 2018. It’s right there in the TurboSmooth modifier. There is the main parameter for the scene, and consequently the render. There is also a Render Iters parameter that when checked allows you to specify the smoothing iterations for rendering. There are some other parameters there too, for Isoline Display and Explicit Normals, for example. 
With Walter and Funkatmyer both over to 3DS Max it’s time to get some materials for Funkatmyer and rig them both. I still haven’t looked for a newer rigging tutorial for 3DS Max. I need to do that soon. I was thinking, maybe this weekend. Then again, I still need to make my travel arrangements for the ZBrush Summit. And I have been invited to see the Minecraft creations of one of my Taekwondo classmates. So some of my time is spoken for.
Because of the test for the day job, I really haven’t been doing much 3D work. Just a little here and there for the last 2 or 3 weeks and I have to say, I miss it. I realized that while I was doing the little bit of work with Funkatmyer and Walter. I guess that tells me something. I wonder if that will sink in and result in more work? Come on back and find out.