Yes, daylight saving time as begun in the U.S. I have a few issues with the whole concept, and I could go on and on about them. However, you’re not here to read my complaints and arguments against daylight saving time. Suffice to say I have no idea how one saves
daylight.
Since I left off last week realizing the ‘P’ and the ‘Y’ weren’t quite up to snuff and didn’t yet fit with the ‘H’ and ‘A’, that’s where I started. In general working on the ‘P’ wasn’t too bad. Not that it was a quick finish up. It took time. I did remember the trick of viewing the thumbnails of a render of the letter to determine if it was balloony enough and if it fit well with the other letters. This helped quite a bit. It made it easier to identify the areas that had problems and even what needed to be adjusted. Once again, a lot of time was spent moving edges and vertices.
The ‘Y’, though deceptively simple looking, was not as co-operative. It seems like I spent much more time and effort to get the ‘Y’ to be more balloony than with the ‘P’. It was a little tricky where the top v-shape meets the bottom post. I added some edge loops to get better control of the shape and to keep it from losing definition. I also added edge loops to the upper arms and to the post. This allowed me a bit more to work with to get a fuller, rounder look in those areas. I was pretty close to having the ‘Y’ ready so I moved it back in line with the other ballooned letters. That’s when I could see that it wasn’t quite there. It needed more poof. I decided to try a minor scale up in the x and y axes. I scaled up the ‘P’ in the y axis and it was that little extra that finished that off so I hoped it would be the same for the ‘Y’. When I tried to scale the ‘Y’ it only sort of worked. It looked like it was going to scale nicely except it was also getting squished. Some how my scale settings got changed from uniform scale to scale and squash. I switched it back and all is good. And the ‘Y’ now fits in with the other letters.
I started on the ‘B’. The ‘B’ requires a little extra work, like the ‘R’ will. The way I created
the ‘B’, the bar between the top bump and the bottom bump is not one bar, it is two. They are two separate bumps not a double bump. The first thing I did was to make that a single bar and thus a double bump. To do this I deleted the inside faces, the ones facing each other between the bumps. I also deleted the band of faces that ran around the spine and between the bumps. I then adjusted the vertices so they matched up and welded the corresponding top and bottom vertices to each other. I once again have a single object. Next up, time to start poofing things out. Except the proportions were off. The bar was too thick and the top and bottom bumps were too similar in size. Adjusting that was fairly easy. I just selected a group of edge loops and raised them a bit. Not so bad. As you can see the bar is still not right and there is more work to do to get the ‘B’ looking nice and balloony and fitting in with the other letters. It’s slow going, but it’s progress.
I still have reservations and concerns about this Birthday card design. Not so much the work involved anymore. I think I’m past that. I’m more concerned that it won’t turn out to be of the quality I want. Don’t get me wrong, I will do my best in the modeling and choosing materials and setting up the render. I’m just a little concerned that the idea is too plain and that it won’t be as cool as the Christmas card and won’t have a similar enough feel. But I haven’t been able to come up with a different design that I would like to do instead.
While I fretted over the state of this Birthday card project I finished up the initial background layer for the Studio Sign project. I decided that since I mentioned it last week, it would be a good idea to at least get that much done. Here’s a picture of it. It is coming along but I really want the background a little darker and denser, less white paper showing through. I think the next layer will be a straight Payne’s Grey instead of a mixed color. It should add some depth as well as darkening the background.
And now we are at the end of another post. I get to participate in this year’s disaster recovery testing at the day job this week. I’m expecting that to mean that I will have very little work time between the day job and the exercise events so I have a feeling I won’t make much progress until the weekend. Then again, who knows, my part could go much smoother than I’m expecting and I will have lots of time to work on the card and maybe something else. Check back next week to see what happens.