A Little Closer and Getting Ready

Posted on August 15, 2017 by SusanG

I’ve said this before, I’m always hoping and wanting to get more done than I usually do. I was even on track to do just that this week. And then didn’t. This week it’s ok. I am preparing to start an online course that I really want to do well in. I’m trying to get everything ready so that I have enough time set aside for it. As a result, I’ve had to rearrange when and how I do things.

I signed up to take this course that is expected to take 10 to 15 hours a week. At least I think that’s what it said. And I watched a video they sent of another student talking about one of their projects from the course and they said the one project took them all day. So yeah. Need to make sure I make the time. I’m looking forward to it. It’s an opportunity to refresh and interest and some skills that have rusted a bit. It could even lead to new ideas of things to create. The course is two months and I still need to get that Holiday card ready. So things could get a little crazy.

At least I’m a little closer to getting the Holiday card ready. I got Walter, the Worm Guy all rigged. I had a few issues with that. I’m a bit out of practice with the whole skinning and weighting process in 3DS Max. I couldn’t remember how to get to one setting I was looking for so I had trouble getting really fine adjustments to some of the weights. As a result, you can see in this first render, some of the transitions between body sections weren’t as smooth as I really wanted. Oh had I had a little trouble with the eyes at one point. Even though they are grouped with the body, when I skinned the bones and then moved them the eyes rolled back in the head funny. I had to actually skin the head bone to the eyes as well. Then it was all good. It’s not ideal. Ideally I would setup an sub-rig sort of thing for the eyes and have them move with the head but also be able to look around. I’m not really interested in that right now so I didn’t bother. I did make a note though to go back later and give him a better rig in general. It will probably include the eye rig.

Now you might notice in the second render that everything looks much smoother. If I was having that much issue with the finer adjustments what did I do? I found a setting in the skinning modifier that let me change the way the bones were impacting the skin by switching it to a “heat map” method. I’m not sure what the difference is/was or why it looks so much better. It does, and at the moment, that’s all I care about. Walter renders out much nicer now.

I’m still working on which way to go about getting him into the card scene since the render is from one of the frames in the animation timeline I created to work on the skinning part. But hey, I’ll get there. I’ve made it this far. Now onto Funkatmyer the Funky Bird.

Funkatmyer does still need his rig and his materials. I didn’t make any progress there. I have found that the tutorial I used to rig Sticks is the only one really available for rigging in 3DS Max in the current Pluralsight catalog. So that’s what I will be using. Since I’m using 3DS Max 2018 I will need to go through and setup some of the tools that I had previously setup and then I should be able to basically follow along with the tutorial, roughly, to rig Funkatmyer. I remember it being a big job. I am a little concerned that I won’t have him ready for the Holiday card this year. Still, I have some time off from the day job coming up so I might make it. We’ll see. The course I’m taking could take up a lot of that time that I was thinking I would be spending on Funkatmyer and the card.

So at this point, I’m planning on having Walter the Worm Guy, Sticks and the Snowman on the card for sure. I have an idea of what I might do, just don’t know if it’s going to work out like I want. I won’t really know until I start putting everyone in place and do some test renders.

That’s where things are for me. New class starts this week and then I’ll have two weeks off from the day job and lots to do at for the 3D art stuff. I have a feeling it will be a busy vacation, even if I never leave my house. Come back and find out how the first week of class goes, and also the start of the vacation.

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Now, Where Was I…

Posted on August 8, 2017 by SusanG

Oh yeah. I’m supposed to be making travel arrangements, and a couple of cards and I probably a dozen other things.

A quick update on the test for the day job. It did not go as well as I had hoped. I had hoped to pass. I did not. I got close but that really doesn’t make it a pass. They don’t give you a certificate for almost. For now though, I have started to return to things I had put on hold.

Which is pretty much the same stuff I was doing before I had to study for the test. 3D art stuff.

After a full weekend that require I alter my routine a little, I finally sat down to work on Walter. I started with him because I figured he would be the fastest to get ready for the Holiday card. Remember, I’ve got to build a more complicated rig for Funkatmyer.

There were a couple of false starts with getting a new set of bones laid out. For their default setting the bones were so much larger that he is. I hope he scales appropriately for the card. Anyway. I adjusted their size and then laid them out. It wasn’t too difficult, he’s just a straight line. Once I had the bones I was ready for the IK solver. The situation with that was much that same as in Maya. Or so I thought. Some how I have managed to get it to start at the head and go to the tail and bend in the correct direction.

I had a few false starts with the IK solver as well. I tried to use a couple of different options that didn’t really work and then I tried changing some settings and that made a mess too. As I was testing what might work I found the spline solver option. I’ve seen this in one of the tutorials I’ve watched and I think it will ultimately be the best solution for Walter because of the control it will allow. It would allow for more refined control over his pose because I could reshape the curve of his bend to flatten it or change the angle of the head or chest or tail. But it will take a lot more work, and some research, to figure out how to get it setup correctly. So for the moment I’ll stick with the basic IK solver.

I managed to get the bones skinned to the model, or the model skinned to the bones. I’m not sure which is correct. Anyway, they are attached. Now I’m trying to paint the weights so he deforms nicely when he bends. I got started on it, and was busy working along thinking I had only been working a few minutes. Then I realized it was past time to go to bed by about an hour. That meant the next day at the day job was going to be a bit rough. I’ve still got more work to do for the weight painting before it’s really ready for some renders. As a result, I don’t really have much to show as far as pictures yet. I’ve just got a couple of screen captures where I’ve got the model in ‘see through’ mode so you can see the bones.

I know I’m going finish up the weight painting, and get a good pose next. I’m not sure what I’m going to tackle after that. I still need to see if there is a newer rigging method for 3DS Max that I can use for Funkatmyer. If not, that’s ok. I can do the one I’ve done before. It’s just going to take a bit of dedicated time to get that built, configured, skinned and weighted. Maybe now, with that test out of the way, I can get to that. We’ll see. Come back and find out.

 

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Little by Little, and Almost There

Posted on August 1, 2017 by SusanG

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.

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…And I Didn’t Get Sick

Posted on July 25, 2017 by SusanG

That visit to try out PlayStation VR turned out pretty successful. I was able to experience it and didn’t walk away really miserable. That’s success in my book. That’s about the biggest success of the week to be honest. I didn’t get much art done even at the weekend.

About the only thing I made progress on was getting Mental Ray for 3DS Max 2018 installed. The download was a bit funny. It started out saying it was going to take 3 hours for 300 MB. It didn’t. It took less than an hour. The install was really quick. No fuss, no muss. It installed it’s plugins right where they were supposed to go. That’s cool since I install most everything on a different drive from my C: drive. I haven’t had much of a chance to work with it yet. I just opened 3DS Max 2018 to see if Mental Ray was there now and to check things out in the Slate Material Editor to see if all the options where there. They were. Cool.

I guess this answers my dilemma as to what to do with Funkatmyer. It looks like I’m going to try moving Funkatmyer from Maya to 3DS Max 2018 and work with him there. I may want to look for a newer rigging tutorial for 3DS Max. Just in case there are some new shortcuts or a little easier way to go about rigging. Oh. I’m going to need to get on that. Ok. And I’ll want to bring Walter over to 3DS Max. At least so he can be in the picture for the card. Fortunately, his rig is fairly simple. It might move with him. If it does, awesome. If not then I guess I’ll remake it.

Nice. So while I’m not quite on the track and ready to go for the Christmas card, I’m at least at the station. It’s progress. Small but progress.

Back to my VR trial. That was fun. I didn’t expect to last as long as I did in it. I really expected to start feeling uncomfortable after just a little bit but I didn’t. There is this fun little game for the Autonots or whatever they are called, cute little robot things that are in the PlayStation Playroom. Anyway, there is a game that you have to rescue a bunch of them. I had fun with that. It’s really cute. I did start to have a little issue after I did too much jumping. But I stopped doing that and backed off for a moment and was able to continue other parts of it. So that’s cool.

I also got to try a diving experience thing. It was ok. There were things about it that reminded me of EPCOT in Florida. The Living Seas exhibit with all the man made rocks and coral. That was my impression of this underwater experience when closer to the surface. Farther down, where the light was not as good, the illusion worked better. Though there was a rope on the metal cage that bugged me.

We tried out TEKKEN 7 but it isn’t really a virtual reality compatible game. There is a VR mode but it’s not like being one of the fighters in the game. What I did get to try out that was very VR was Star Trek Bridge Crew. I didn’t get to play for long and we did take quite a long time trying to figure out how to give commands. But once you get the hang of it, it’s not too bad. It is a pretty good VR experience for that.

All in all the VR tryout thing was a success. My course of study in college was in VR, quite a while ago, and my experiences since then had led me to feel that I was not going to be able to experience it at all, or at least not comfortably. Now, I have to admit, I’m looking at it again. I am considering picking up a VR headset, I’m just not sure if it will be PlayStation or something else. But that all starts to get into a different discussion.

For now, I will get back to working on Funkatmyer and Walter and the Christmas Card and finish studying for my test for the day job. I’m close. I’m actually going to book the test this week to take next week. I’ll sure be glad to have that done. I will need a little play time in between studying and now that I have a plan, there might be more to show and tell on the 3D art front next week so come back and find out.

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While I Decide

Posted on July 18, 2017 by SusanG

It was a busy week at the day job and then in the evenings as well. That means I didn’t get the chance to do some of the research and testing that I kind of need to do before continuing with Funkatmyer. I did manage to get a little study time in for the test for the day job. And that was about it until the weekend.

I don’t really want to push forward too much with Funkatmyer and I guess even Walter until I decide how I want to handle the Christmas card. That means that when I got to the weekend I wasn’t really ready to work on any current projects. So. While I’m doing my research and testing and deciding what I want to do about that I figured I’d take a moment to play with Blender and see what I can do in it now that I’ve had a little practice in other programs. Which I think has helped.

I have been taking stabs at Blender for a few years now. I’ve purchased some books and not gotten far with them and even tried following an online tutorial. I still didn’t have much luck. For me, Blender has had a really steep learning curve. However, in the last couple of years, or so Pluralsight (and possibly Digital Tutors before that) have created some Blender tutorials for specific processes like modeling, rendering, rigging and such. So far I’ve watched the relatively short course called “Your First Day in Blender”. This was great. It showed me a few things that I hadn’t grasped before and also pointed out a few really cool tools that I wasn’t aware were there.

So with a bit of modeling practice now and that tutorial done, I figured I’d try creating a character in Blender. I usually just create coffee mugs or teapots. No, really. I think that’s all I’ve ever done with Blender. So time to try something a little more complex. I decided to try a bi-ped humanoid character. Normally for something like this I would start with a sphere. This time I started with a cylinder. It was the method used in the tutorial I watched to create a weird worm thing so I decided to give it a try. It looks like it’s going to work out ok. At least so far.

One of the things I like with Blender is that for the end caps on the cylinder you can leave it as an n-gon and then go in and cut it yourself. You can do that in 3DS Max and Maya as well. However, I haven’t found where when you do that you can just go from vertex to vertex and if you cross and edge as you do that the program just creates any new points you need. It might be there but I haven’t seen it. Blender does it. With no fuss or muss. This is fabulous as far as I’m concerned. So, following the method used in the tutorial, that’s what I did. Then I went in and started shaping the head. I did have a couple of false starts. But finally I got the hang of what I was trying to do and I got the hang of moving around. Which is something. Another of the differences of Blender as compared to some of the other programs is the way it renders. The start scene includes a light and a camera and it uses the camera for renders. I didn’t feel like messing with that and trying to make sure there was enough lighting at the moment so for now, my images are all just screen shots. That’s why in some of them you actually see the wire-frame over the solid view. In the ones where you don’t see it it’s because I switched to object mode before I took the screen shot. It gives you an idea of how it’s looking so far. A couple of things that I want to do are to remove the left half of the object and then apply a mirror modifier so that I only have to work on the one side. And I may also add a subdivision modifier so I can see it smoothed out more. For now though, it’s coming along.

I’m going to have to make time to get my research and testing done this week, or maybe next, so that I can get on with Funkatmyer and then get to the Christmas card. This week will be a bit tight though. I have an opportunity to get to see and play with PlayStation VR. A day job colleague has it and has offered for me to come try it out, and she wants to see what TEKKEN 7 is like in it since it’s supposed to be VR capable/compatible, something like that. I’m probably going to make myself sick. I get Video Induced Motion Sickness with first person shooters and the last time I tried VR I had the same thing. So I don’t expect to last long but I get to try it. Also, I need to get my study done for that test for the day job. It needs to take priority so I will likely spend most of the week doing that. With luck I’ll get back to some modeling by the weekend again. Wish me luck.

 

 

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