Last week was vacation from the day job. Or as my co-worker called it ‘my stay-cation’. I had no plans to go anywhere just time off so I could work on the Birthday Card, sleep in a bit and get a few things taken care of, like having the car serviced. I was also expecting family members to arrive from the Pacific Northwest. Kind of a full week for a vacation without travel. I had it all worked out though and managed to get the Birthday Card done but not much else.
I worked pretty intently the first couple of days of the week to finish up the rigging on the robot hands and get the weight painting completed. I wanted to show that I really did rig them for animating so I created a short video, not even 2 seconds long, of the hands moving from one pose to another and put it up on YouTube. Don’t blink when you watch it.
After that little diversion, I imported the hands into the scene with the balloons. I scaled them to a size that looked right and then positioned them. I was able to get them both in roughly the correct places just using the global control to position them just behind the strings from the balloons. It wasn’t perfect just a good start. Then I had to move each, one at a time, as well as rotate them so they would look right when I closed them up to hold the strings. Once I had them in about the right place and at the right angle, that’s when I started posing them. As I was posing the hands to hold the strings, I found that the strings weren’t quite long enough. Instead of moving the hands up I just lengthened and adjusted the strings to fit down into the hands better. In some cases I also had to make adjustments to the angle of the string to make it look more natural.
When I tested some of the rigging controls I was a little concerned that my angle of the thumb controls might be really off, but I decided not to try to correct it. When I got to posing the thumb it finally clicked with me that it was the space I was trying to rotate in that was more the issue than the angle of the rig control. Normally I work all my translations (moving an object), rotations and scaling in what is called World view. So all those actions happen in relation to the scene. What I needed to do for the thumb was to rotate it in either gimbel or local view. With local view that means that it is rotating in relation to the control that I have selected, this includes it’s angle. As an example, if I had two boxes one box that I rotated 30 degrees and then froze that so that became it’s default position. If I select it to rotate it in world view, it would look a bit like it was tumbling. The other box, if I left it as I had created it and decided to rotate it in world view, it would look more like it was spinning. If I want to rotate that first box so that it looks more like it is spinning then I have to choose the local view to rotate in because then the gizmo for rotating will have the same orientation as the box.
I know it’s confusing. I usually forget to use the local view for rotating or even scaling. When it came to posing the thumb, especially, it was important to use local view for the rotation. This allowed me to get a smoother and more natural looking pose of the thumb. I didn’t have too much trouble with rolling the fingers down and in to complete the fist look. I just had to do it finger by finger and joint by joint. Then I found that the strings were breaking the surface of the hands. They looked like they were going right through the hand. So I had to adjust the placement and angle of some of the strings again. I was going to have the hands at the same height but it didn’t really look right, I think it looks more interesting with them just a little off from each other. So here’s a shot of the final card in case you didn’t see the announcement post. You can see it on my Zazzle store. I have a link to the store on the right.
And as an additional little treat, here are a couple of stills of the hands from the animation I posted to YouTube.
That was all I got worked on this week. By the time I got that completed and posted and announced everywhere, I had house guests coming. This was my minor disruption. My house guests are family members that have decided that the Pacific Northwest is not for
them so they are moving back east. Most of the family is either in the Midwest or in the east, primarily southeast. They were kind of off on their own lonesome out there and after a health issue last year as well as not really enjoying the area they decided that maybe being closer than a 9 hour plane ride would be a good idea. They had been in Florida before but really wanted some place different so since I’m in the Carolinas and I have a sibling that flies through here a lot, they figured it would be a good place to shoot for. No matter how much we love and enjoy our family and guests, they do tend to bring a minor disruption to our routine and that has been the case for me. As a result I don’t have much else to get to share this week. I got the card done and posted and that’s been it.
I am optimistic that I will get to work on something this week. I’m a little between working on the Sticks animation and starting on the Halloween Card. Yes, Halloween. I may try to work on both. At least get started on the card and start to get Sticks set up. That would be cool. And since it is May, I should probably start thinking about the Holiday/Christmas Card for this year. I’m thinking of using the sleigh I was working on last summer. I could put Sticks in a Santa hat handing out presents, or something like that. What do you think? Maybe? Maybe not? I’ll figure something out. I have bits and pieces of ideas floating around in my head that might manage to put themselves together. Check back to find out what happens next.