Look at that, 2016 finally ended. Now we’ve got a whole new year ahead of us. I wonder what I will get done this year.
I don’t generally make New Year’s resolutions. I just don’t. I do take some time and try to decide what I want to work on or get done during the year. I do this to hopefully give myself some focus when it comes to working on projects for the year. I only did ok last year, as far as I’m concerned. I struggled with a couple of projects. And I have two projects that I tried to set as priorities that I am still nowhere close to having complete. I think I might do better than ok this year.
I’ve chosen 4 priorities for this year. One personal and 3 related to SusanG Productions. The personal one is my black belt in Taekwondo. Last I heard from my Master, I’m very close to being ready to test for that. I am very excited about it, and a little, nervous. I suspect I will be much more than a little nervous the closer it gets to the test.
For the SusanG Productions priorities, I’ve chosen 2 cards, the 2017 Christmas card, and probably the 2017 Halloween card. I’ve also chosen my business card. I know. That one really should have been a priority last year or before. So now it is a priority for this year. I think I want to do a set with a variety of images, so if I order 200 cards there might be 3, 4 or 5 different pictures on them. My stylist does this and I think it’s kind of fun. To do the multiple images I kind of want/need several images to put on the cards. I don’t want them to all look like my greeting cards and I don’t want them all to be Christmas themed. So, I need to create a handful of really cool scenes or characters that I want to use. Sticks, will of course be on one of the cards, and maybe the Snowman. I’m working on the Penguin and it might make it. I might try the Worm Guy after that, or maybe… I’m not sure. Once I have the images, I’ll work on the layout. It’s going to take a little time, as you might guess. I’m hoping to have them ordered and back to me by the end of June. We’ll see how that goes.
I know the winter animation of Sticks doesn’t really fit in with my 4 priorities, but it could help with the business cards or some other things that may fit into the priority slots as others are completed. So I worked on that a little. It’s not very long, maybe 2 seconds or so. It’s 76 frames so far. It took about 40 minutes to set the key frames. Then I did a test render of one frame and because it was set to a production level render, it took over 5 minutes to render the one frame. I wanted to see a test of what I have animated so far so I adjusted the settings for rendering so that the image quality is not so high and then I set to render all 76 frames to a video. There was some risk involved doing it this way. If something had happened, the program crashed, or the computer crashed or something like that, I would have lost the entire render. Fortunately that didn’t happen and 2 hours and 41 minutes later I had this little video to share with you.
I also got back to working on the Penguin. I was going to work on attaching the beak to the head and that wasn’t really going the way I hoped. I want to make sure that it doesn’t look like a gaping hole if I open the beak so I wanted attach the top and bottom parts to each other and then fill in the back. Again, that didn’t really work. As I was looking at it and 
thinking about how I might go about getting the results I want, I realized that I needed to do something about the puffy cheek look. It was too square looking, it didn’t really look right. So instead of working on the beak I ended up working on the cheek and then the eye socket. I got the cheek so it looks nice and smoothly puffy and I made some adjustments around the eye socket to give some detail and interest.
After working on those things, and having failed with the beak. At least so far. I am reconsidering how to handle the beak. I may extrude some faces and model it fresh, directly from the head instead of trying to attach what I have to the head. It might work better. Maybe. With that now something to think about, that step for the Penguin is a little on hold until I decide how I want to proceed. This is where it helps to have more than one thing to work on. I can go off and work on something else while my brain thinks about what to do. Hmmm…guess I could get back to the Worm Guy. I’ll need him modeled and rigged if I want to use him on my business card.
I hope everyone had a lovely Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanza, Yule, and New Year’s celebration. As you can see, I’m already trying to dive in and get things going for the new year. Here’s hoping 2017 turns out to be great.