Yep, on to the next project. The Birthday Card for 2016 is complete and posted so now it’s time to start something else. I’ve got a few ideas but nothing has started begging me to make it so it is more difficult to choose. If one idea were just screaming to be made it would be really easy. Still, I’ve decided. Well, sort of. I’ve more or less chosen by default.
Not always the best way to choose something, by default, but it is a way. I really want to do something for Halloween. I like the holiday and I want to do some fun stuff for it. I figure I can start by making a card. Now, what to put on the card. I have a traditional type of idea
as well as something a little less conventional. And I have a few things in between. I’m having trouble deciding which way to go. One of the ideas involves creating a skull. I’ve only made an attempt at this once. It was in the ZBrush class I took last year at the ZBrush Summit. Another idea involves a Jack’o Lantern. I’ve done that before but it was in ZBrush and for this I’m using 3DS Max. So that will be different. Hoping to find some inspiration and maybe nail down the idea, I did a bit of sketching last week. I’m not sure they helped me make a decision, but here they are.
Speaking of ZBrush and the ZBrush Summit. Pixologic have announced the dates for this year’s ZBrush Summit. It is to be the weekend of September 30th to October 2nd. You can get info over on the Pixologic site. One cool thing I saw when I was looking at the site,
was that in one of the promotional pictures they are using from the past summits, you can see me. As silly as it sounds, I was excited. I don’t expect to be attending in person this year. I will, however, be attending remotely. They did an awesome job with that the first year, and I caught a little that way last year, even though I was there in person. So if you can’t get there in person, sign up on the site so you get the updates and the information so you can watch it remotely.
Back to projects. Now you have a glimpse of one of the ideas for the Halloween card that I might be playing with. I have a few more ideas so this is just a start. Because I don’t have a set idea yet and I could come up with another one or two ideas before I get everything finalized it makes it a little difficult to figure out where to start. I want and need to start modeling something. Do I start with a skull or a jack’o lantern or something else? I finally decided to just start with a jack’o lantern. It’s versatile and I need it for a couple of the card ideas so it wouldn’t be a waste. Jack’o Lantern it is.
The thing about a jack’o lantern is that it is deceptively easy. You start with a sphere and cut some holes in it. Of course, you know it’s not that easy. Especially if you want to put a light inside and have it cast light and shadows properly. I put a lot of thought into how I wanted to handle this. If I just cut holes in the sphere and then render it, what happens is that the inside of the sphere is transparent when looking out, so you look through the holes into nothing. A bit like one way glass. So the problem becomes how to keep that from happening. I thought about trying to make the polygons double-sided but I want some thickness so it looks like a pumpkin that has been carved. If I just make the polygons double-sided then I don’t have thickness and I don’t know if I can apply one material to the outside and another to the inside.
My solution was to duplicate the pumpkin and then scale down the duplicate so it fits
inside. Then I wanted to try to flip the normals on the inside pumpkin so that if you are inside the smaller pumpkin, you can no longer see out and you can see whatever material is assigned to it. I tested this first just to make sure it was going to work. Here’s a shot of that test. You can see I created the lid and did something similar. You can also see, in the pumpkin, that space between the big one and the smaller one, you can see where you can see though the other side of the big pumpkin. This is a good example of the issue I’m trying to resolve. It also demonstrates one of the next challenges I needed to address.
I need thickness, I also need to bridge that gap between the two pumpkins. I can do that by attaching one pumpkin to the other and then creating the faces to go between the two. Even though I want the inside and those edges to be attached to the outside pumpkin I want them to be separate elements so it’s easier to apply different materials to the inside and the outside. My solution to this was to attach the inside to the outside and then create the faces. As I did this, I left the previous faces I created selected so when I was finished I had all the new faces selected. I was then able to detach them from the two pumpkins to make them separate elements. Once I had all the filler edges created and detached, then I detached the inside pumpkin from the outside. Then I attached the new elements to the inside pumpkin and also welded the points so that I ended up with the inside pumpkin with these edges or lips. All one element. So then when I attached the outside pumpkin back to the inside pumpkin I had two elements that I could apply different materials to.
I sort of jumped over creating the face of the jack’o lantern. I tend to fall back on the cliche version with the triangle eyes and nose and the goofy grin. I am trying to do something a little more interesting. To achieve that I had to do a lot of cutting to create the edges and shapes I wanted so I could cut out the parts that are to be openings. That was a little 
frustrating to do. Things don’t smooth quite as I would like and to get that may take a lot of manual manipulation. But I’ve got something that is a little interesting for now. I did the cut outs before I created the inside pumpkin, that way I didn’t have to try to duplicate the same holes. Then I duplicated it and scaled it down to fit inside. From there I created the filler edges. To test it all I applied some really basic standard materials of different colors to the inside and the outside. It’s coming along. I need to make the stem for the top. And I may even make a candle to go inside to make the light source more realistic.
I did a little prep work for the Sticks animation. I checked the pivot points for the letters and made sure they were all at the same point in relation to each letter. And I made note of the locations of the letters along the Z and Y axis so I can get things back in place at the end. It’s not work that you can really take renders or screenshots of. Well, maybe I could but they wouldn’t be very interesting.
In the time since I started the jack’o lantern I’ve seen a font on a design van that is trying to work it’s way into the scene and it could sway the direction of the Halloween card towards a little more ghoul-ly and slightly macabre. With that possibility, I might need to let that one simmer a little longer. It could be worth it to get into the Sticks animation project more this week while the Halloween idea stews a little more. Though I could go back to the jack’o lantern and finish up the stem. Whichever I do, I’ve at least got things to work on. I suggest checking back for the next update to find out how it’s going and what is getting worked on.