A Bird and a Squid

Posted on April 4, 2017 by SusanG

There should be a punch line to go with that, don’t you think? I don’t have one. It’s what I worked on this week. In addition to trying to finish putting the Art room back together and figuring out what to do with the stuff that maybe doesn’t belong in there.

At the end of last week’s post I made mention that a date has been set for this year’s ZBrush Summit. As I thought about whether or not to make plans to go in person this year, I thought about how I haven’t really made a lot of progress in my ZBrush skills. I’ve
made a little, but not a lot. I haven’t been spending much time working in ZBrush, I’ve spent it in 3DS Max or Maya where I am comfortable creating lower poly characters that I can then, hopefully, rig for posing in a variety of different ways. In ZBrush, I am still venturing through “the valley of suck”. That’s not to say that everything I do looks awful. It doesn’t. But it’s certainly incomplete. So I got to thinking that I might want to make another effort at improving my ZBrush skills. With that in mind I popped over to YouTube and watched some of the ZClassroom videos as a refresher. That also provided some inspiration for a little experimenting.

The results of the experimenting in ZBrush are this character, or rather, start of a character. I have previously tried to create a Squid in ZBrush and as I was doing it I discovered that I started too small and didn’t have the room to create the mouth or beak that is in the middle of all the tentacles. The video I was watching was doing a lot of moving a mouth around to open it and hollow it out and reshape it and so on. It’s a technique I’ve read about, and then tried to implement, and I’ve probably even seen it
before. This time the lesson stuck. So back to this beak. I decided I would give the squid a try again only this time I would start with the beak on the inside and then work out from there. I’m not sure how well it’s going to work but this is the start of that.

The squid head then led me to messing around in my sketchbook and I came up with Squiddy. Don’t let Squiddy’s slouchy posture and apparent delinquent attitude fool you. Squiddy is extremely intelligent, did well in school and all of that. Squiddy just can’t be bothered to explain it all to you. I’m thinking this sketch will be my model going forward on the Squid sculpt. We’ll see. Though, it is a design I would like to be able to rig for animating. Who knows, maybe I’ll get that figured out.

I got a little more work in on the FunkyBird. I’ve got some shape to the leg and kind of know what I’m going to do to finish it off. I just can’t decide if I should go ahead and model feet to go in the bulky boots and then model the boots separate. That’s probably what I should do. Now that I’ve decided that I’ll be able to move forward with the foot and get started on the arm. I still need to work on the face too. That will be interesting. Or not. I have a suspicion that I might not have enough polygons. Guess I will find out. Here are a couple of views of the leg. You can see that once I got a length for the thigh then I went ahead and tapered it. I’ll want to put in a knee and then get in the lower leg and foot.

      I didn’t sketch the lower part of the FunkyBird originally so when working on that part, I’m really making it up as I go. Which is fine but it can make it slower to make progress. I’ve got a better idea of what I want to do there now so with enough effort, I could start to make good progress.

I was thinking about how my dilemma with wanting to progress in ZBrush and yet wanting to be able to rig and animate my characters, with relative ease, for me. And I think I’ve got an idea. Sometimes when I doodle I do a sort of bust of a character. Most of the time I don’t get it all filled out but I’ll have an outline and it may include a slight pose which can give a hint of attitude and personality. But not all of these busts, do I want to turn into models to animate. At least, I don’t think I do. So it occurred to me that I can use some of those doodles as reference for sculpts in ZBrush and that would give me something to practice. I still have my other characters and then I have these. And if one of them turns out to be something I want to expand on, then I guess I get to learn how to do that.

That’s my plan for now. I don’t really know how successful I will be at it until I get started with it. It could end up being a lot of fun. Who know’s what you’ll get to see.

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Who Needs Groceries Anyway?

Posted on March 28, 2017 by SusanG

Actually I do. However, sometimes, they can wait. At least that’s what I decided this weekend when I realized that I had spent the time I was going to go grocery shopping not doing that. Instead I spent the time rigging a worm.

It’s true. I thought I would spend just a moment seeing about creating the bones, or joints as Maya calls them, for the rig for the Worm Guy. And then I had to try to setup the IK handle and so it went. The thing about the Worm Guy, at least this incarnation of him, is that all I really want to do with him is to bend his body. I didn’t want to model him in pose because then I’m stuck with that pose if I want to use the character again, or I have to model it again, or I have to do a lot of work to change the pose. If I rig the character, even a little, then I can do more with it later.

Creating the joints wasn’t too bad. It didn’t make much sense to me at first and I think it will take some getting used to compared to 3DS Max. I managed to figure it out. Adding the IK handle which creates the constraint for how all the joints flow was a little tricky. When I first created it, and then tried moving it, the thing had him bending in on his belly, like doubled over laughing. Which would have been fine if that’s what I wanted. But it wasn’t. I tried a couple of things to get it to work and it wasn’t happening. I finally decided to just rotate the Worm Guy 180 degrees and then apply the IK to the joints and it worked.

Of course it wasn’t that easy. It never is. When I tried to rotate the Worm Guy I couldn’t get his eyes to go with the body properly. They were living in their own space. I finally ended up parenting them under the body and then it would all move at the same time in the same direction. It took me ages to finally decide to parent them though. I was looking for an attach option that I couldn’t find. And then I couldn’t find the Parent command. At least that I remembered from one of the tutorials, I just used the ‘p’ key.

With all that figured out and the joint chain created I had to skin the body to the joints. That took a couple of tries. Then it was time to figure out how to weight the joints to the skin and make everything look reasonably right when I started bending him. The first try was a mess. The second try took some work and I had it. I thought I was all good and then I deleted the history and lost all the weight settings. Ugh. Third time was the charm and I managed to not take quite as long as I did on either of the previous tries. I might like weight painting in 3DS Max better.
Twice this weekend I sat down to work on rigging the Worm Guy. The first time I got side tracked with the materials. I wasn’t too excited about the way the colors and materials came out when I rendered them initially. He looks too much like Ironman. Don’t get me wrong. I like Ironman. I just wasn’t going for that look on my Worm Guy. So I fiddled with the materials some and kept trying to get closer to the cartoon like look that I had in mind. That took some real work. Arnold didn’t want to do things the way I wanted to do them. I finally got some things figured out, like to use the color correction, or even to save as an .exr file. I figured out something else when I did the renders for the posed version of the Worm Guy. For that I used Maya’s render window and set it to use the Arnold renderer instead of what I had been doing which was using the Arnold Viewport. This got me what I was expecting. Finally.

I’ve included some of the earlier poses and renders so you can see some of the difference and here he is, the Worm Guy, rendered in his final pose. At least for now.

Now I can get on with setting up the scene for him. That will be interesting.

I have to say, after the issues I had with Arnold I’m not sure how I feel about it. I really like the feature where you can add the
smoothing at render time like it does. Still, the bit with being able to see the materials correctly, that is a little annoying. I think I’m going to have to come to terms with it though. If the tweet I read on Friday is true, it looks like even the next 3DS Max will have Arnold instead of Mental Ray. So, for the moment it looks my choices will be the application’s native renderer, Arnold, or figure out how to get and use some other external renderer. We’ll see how it goes. It will be interesting to see how Arnold is implemented in 3DS Max and if it has the same cool feature(s) as well as the same issues.

This week I have a free evening. I would have two except for that grocery shopping I neglected to do at the weekend. That extra day could be really productive, or really lazy and at the moment, I’m not sure which way it’s going to go.

And late breaking news. The ZBrush Summit for 2017 has been announced. It will be the weekend of October 6-8. And apparently, part of it will start on the 5th as a stream only. I need to get over to the site and sign up for updates.

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The Room Has Paint…And a New Name

Posted on March 21, 2017 by SusanG

Yay! There is fresh paint on the walls of the room I do my work in at home. I have two purple walls and two sky blue walls. It’s fabulous.

And interestingly, once I got the painting finished the room had it’s name. Ok. I know, for so many it’s just a room. But you know, the name matters. I have a Music Room and it’s perfectly happy to be and to be called the Music Room. This room has been different. It has never really felt right to call it the office, even the studio felt weird, so I tried play room, computer room, and even work room. All of those sounded awkward to me. Once I finished painting and got the gear put away, it was automatically the Art Room.

So now that the Art Room is painted, and I have the big bookcases in place, I have started moving some things back into the room. Not a lot. Just enough to start to get the feel of where things will go. I think it’s going to work out so much better. I expect to have a few things that I’m not sure what to do with. No doubt they will find their place in the end.

I think I will be getting back to that art stuff now. So much to do.

There is the Worm Guy to get rigged so I can pose him. And I have a fun little scene I want to do with him so there is all that to build as well. And that Penguin still needs some materials. Oh! And Sticks. I had a thought on how to go about working on animating his walking. It was pointed out to me that part of why he looks like he is doing a reverse moon walk is probably because he doesn’t pick up his foot to start. So I think I may start by setting the up and down, a bit like a very flat footed march, with the forward motion and then go back in and work on setting the roll of the foot and the heel strike. That might make it easier. Sure it means there are more iterations but since this is the first animation of a character walking, you know, I’ve not done it before, so it’s going to take a while to get it figured out. A few extra iterations? No big deal. Think of all I will get to learn.

Speaking of learning. Remember how I learned that with the Arnold renderer in Maya you can set the smoothing to happen at render time so you can save on your poly count? I was working on the Funky Bird and decided to test that. Normally, I will smooth the model before I do a test render to see the work as I’m going along. I had done that and saved it. Then I turned off the smooth, rendered with Arnold where I had set up my smoothing. Sure enough. I had to take a screen shot so you could see. Pretty cool stuff.

You did read that I was working on the Funky Bird. After the painting, and the doing work of the day job, and black belt prep class, I finally got time, and energy to work on some art. I had left off working on the leg. It was a start but still needed lots of shaping. I have managed to get good front to back placement. It should help to set the vibe of the character and ultimately help give it some personality. I did a lot of moving vertices to get it shaped up an then I shifted the whole leg a bit forward. I want to give it a little bit of a flattened out backside but I want to put tail feathers in, so I don’t want to go too flat. I’m still working on the side to side placement, though it’s beginning to take shape on it’s own.

  

I spent a little time adjusting the lights. I’m going to need to add another one when I’m ready to see both sides. Right now I have one in the front, and not quite at the right height, and one on the right side of the picture (left side of the character). They don’t provide quite enough light to see everything really well. It’s ok for the moment, just something I will want to think about soon.

With the Art Room painted and an extra day off from the day job this week, I’m planning on getting more stuff put back and more work in on the projects. I hope to be able to keep the hose from crimping up and maybe get some good solid work in on something. That would be nice. Check back to see how that goes.

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And Now We Have Paint

Posted on March 14, 2017 by SusanG

That was a long week. I was ready for it to be done much earlier than it was. I had planned, Friday, after I got off from the day job that I’d pick up paint to start on the walls of the play room. Normally the end of the day on Friday comes early in the afternoon. Not last week. My normally 5 hour or so day was 12. I did not make it to get paint on Friday.

I had it set in my head that I was starting to paint this room this weekend. So after Taekwondo class on Saturday I headed to the store for paint. I’m covering these tan colored walls and I found out last summer that it doesn’t cover easily. Now, that color
is nearly the bane of my existence. At least in the play room it is. I got 2 gallons of primer and then for the top coat I got the paint that is supposed to be both. It took 2 coats of the primer to kill the tan enough that it wouldn’t seep through the top coat. It’s awful.

I painted two walls on Saturday and probably should have stopped there but I really  wanted to get one more wall done so I could move the desk into place and start working on the room arrangement, which is changing from what I started with. So instead of resting up and recovering from Saturday’s painting, Sunday, I painted one more wall. I’m glad I did. It feels a lot better in here even if I do still have the one tan wall. But the whole process is such a strain on my body that I will live with it until the weekend. By then
I should have the rest of the furniture shifted around so I can get to the wall.

I’m sharing some pictures. There’s one where you can see the newly painted blue wall, some primer and then the tan wall. That gives a good idea of this color I’m covering. The one with the green tape is a more up close picture with a brighter light. It’s still pretty unpleasant. And the last one is after I got the third wall painted. You can see the blue behind the door and the sort of tropical blue in the hall. They both look really good with that purple.


I could go on about the evils of the tan and what I realized and all that but really, it’s just a matter of taste and preference. I know people who love white walls. I do not. I know people who would love the tan. I don’t anymore. I never loved it but my feeling when I bought the place was that at least the walls weren’t white. I feel very different about that now. (White is a bit easier to cover.)

Most of the week was spent moving things out of the play room to get ready to paint so for most of the week, I didn’t get anything fun done on the computer. I was mostly too tired to even think about it. However, even with the really long day, or possibly because of it, Friday night I got a little play time in.

I worked on the Funky Bird character. I started out refining some of the body shape and
 trying to get that a little more the way I want. At some point when I saved out a work in progress render I got distracted and started playing with the Arnold Render Viewport and all the settings there. I was right about it needing lights. The Arnold renderer doesn’t seem to like to work with the default lights. So I spent a lot of time fussing with getting some lights that are bright enough and show things off nicely. I also played with the smoothing at render time option. That I like. As far as any other work on the bird, I started adding a leg. The way the leg comes down off the lower torso is going to be pretty defining for the look of the character so I think I want to get it in pretty quick. It will also help with placing the arms when I get to that point. Here are a few renders of it so far.

 

I’m not planning on getting the last wall painted until the weekend. I think it may take all week to recover. I am hoping to start getting things shifted around and some items in their new locations. That will be some work. I also have a meeting or two for the day job that are going to run a bit into my after hours time. I’m going to try to work some play time in there though it might be tricky. There’s a big data center thing happening at the day job this weekend and I will have to participate and this is also the first week of black belt prep class so I’ll have an extra Taekwondo session as well. Still I might make some progress on the Funky Bird. I think the Worm and Penguin are going to have to sit just a little longer.

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Where Did The Week Go?

Posted on March 7, 2017 by SusanG

Another week come and gone. That seems to happen on a regular basis. Something else that seems to be happening pretty regularly is me not getting much done on art projects. *sigh* I can’t really say what happened to most of the week. It’s a bit of a blur. To be fair, my manager at the day job was on vacation and that meant I had a lot more to have to deal with, without much support. I made it through it though and it was even mostly a success. So I suppose it shouldn’t be too surprising that by the end of the week my brain was ready for a rest.

As a result, I don’t have a lot of pictures for you this week. Though, I will share this doodle I made on my black “white board”. It’s a little hard to tell but the doodle isn’t actually white it’s in neon green.

I did manage to watch a movie one evening. It was a short movie by today’s standards. Just under an hour and a half. I watched “My Neighbor Totoro”. I’ve seen a couple of other Hayao Miyazaki’s movies and really enjoy them. As it turns out several were on sale at a local Best Buy store so I picked up a few for watching and re-watching. I enjoyed “My Neighbor Totoro” quite a bit and was really struck by the art of the background cells. Much of it reminded me of pieces of fine art. I don’t remember thinking that of “Spirited Away” or “Ponyo”. Though I did love the color of “Ponyo”. So I’m looking forward to watching those two again, as well as watching “Princess Mononoke”, which I also got.

I am working on getting the play room cleared out so I can get it painted. There is so much stuff in here. Wow. I knew it but the process of trying to get it cleared out so I can paint has made it even more apparent. I have lucked out a bit. In all of the stuff in here is/are some old electronics that I have been delaying getting rid of. Mostly because of not wanting to deal with cleaning it off before I get rid of it. It turns out that one of my colleagues from my day job, his wife works for a non-profit that takes old electronics and refurbishes them if they can and if they can’t they will strip them down and recycle what they can. So they separate out the copper and gold and then sell that and whatever else they can and recycle the rest. I’m good with this.

The clean out is moving along. Slowly. Though it gets more imperative each week. Especially since I don’t want this to be like the shower tile project that took all summer. I would like to get the painting done and be able to get back to work. I would also like to get the place reorganized and cleaned up so that I don’t feel so crowded.

As a side note. NASA has announced that they have found home. Ok. I might be joking about the home part. But NASA has announced that they have found a star, Trappist-1, with 7 earth sized planets around it and more than one in the habitable zone. It’s only 40
light years away. At that distance we could be there in 2 weeks at warp factor 3. With that I will leave you with a picture of my new coffee mug.

See you next time.

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