First, a quick update on the car issues from last week. It is all fixed. It needed a new battery and a new starter and no tires, and no oil change. Got lots of miles until the oil change and tires in good shape just needed a rotate and balance. So while still expensive, not near as expensive as it could have been.
I got the urge to work on some 3D modeling so decided to start on the CrabbyPlant that I showed the sketch of last week. I figured I am going to want to animate it, or at least pose it at some point so I wanted to model it in a neutral-ish pose. So I started out trying to make the leaves straight up, thinking that would be the easiest for creating bones. It was coming along, I got the two inside most leaves created and started working on the next one out and changed my mind. I was having some trouble with that third leaf and I started thinking that maybe I should start from the outside leaves and make them all straight out flat. So far I have only one leaf done that way. Those are the pictures in this post, a couple with the leaves up, and one with the one leaf flat.
And then I had a whole flurry of thoughts, ideas, and possible solutions while in the shower. Oh, and on a day that I wasn’t going to be able to do much about them for many, many hours. A few things were solutions for some things I was having trouble with on my second project for my VR class. Most of those didn’t pan out but I still found a solution to at least one of the problems. The other thoughts were about 3D projects, including the CrabbyPlant. For the CrabbyPlant to work really well with an animation rig, it’s going to need basically a spline rig. Something where all the bones follow a spline. In the rigging tutorial I use there is an example of that for the spine of the character. However for CrabbyPlant, every leaf will need it and probably the stalk, not sure about the eye stems. For now, I’m going to model CrabbyPlant in pose and later I will will rework the plant so that I can rig it. I’m not sure which way will be best, with the leaves up or the leaves out. Guess I’ll figure it out when I get to it.
That solves the CrabbyPlant issue. Now I just need to get working on it. By the way that spline rig is the same rig I’m going to need to use for Walter the Worm Guy when I rework his rig. If I do him first, I’ll have a little more practice with it. Of course with 6 leaves and a stalk at minimum, I’ll get quite a bit of practice with CrabbyPlant as well. The other issue I’ve solved is Funkatmyer. I really want more than just the Snowman, Walter, and Sticks on the Holiday card this year. So I think I’m going to save out a file of Funkatmyer with a different name, so I don’t mess up the nice T-pose file. In the new file, I’m just going to pose him as I want him for the card and then I’ll give him some nice holiday colored clothes.
Like with getting back to CrabbyPlant, now I just need to get onto those items. Pose Funkatmyer, put together the holiday scene with everyone in it and get that all dressed up. I had thought I was going to have most of that done already but it is vacation from the day job and a little fun and relaxing has to happen in there. Also, I have the second assignment for my VR class to finish and submit. I’m down to one requirement that I have to get working right and then I may add an extra or two. That’s next up to be worked on. If I get it submitted then I think I might take Wednesday or Thursday, maybe both, and work on the holiday card stuff. At least that’s the plan. You might want to check back and see if that’s how things actually go.
for it like 2 months ago. I’m really glad I did. I started hearing, about 2 weeks ago that they were really hard to find in my area. I bought a few extras so I was even able to share. I didn’t just have the glasses though. I even made a pinhole viewer from some cardboard. This turned out to be a really good idea because we were able to watch the change up to as close as we were going to get to totality without getting a crick in our necks. Then when it was really close we put on the glasses and looked up. Where I live I had roughly 98.4% totality. That turned out to be enough to get to experience the temperature drop and to see the lighting change drastically. It was really cool to see. I tried to take a couple of pictures. One of the sun through my eclipse glasses, using my phone. It’s a bit not clear. But I tried. I also got a picture of the sun on the cardboard through the pinhole. It’s really tiny. The whole thing was really fun and a great day for science and NASA with there being so many events and so many people interested in it.
started an online course in virtual reality this week that is going to take a fair bit of time each week for about 2 months. I’m still working out how I’m scheduling things and I some how managed to work on the class on a day that I had meant to work on art. I’ll get it figured out. But what it means is that the only other art I got done this week was this little sketch I did during a meeting at the day job. I think it’s kind of cute and it will be fun to develop it.
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.
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.
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 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.