The Answers Were Coming

Posted on February 28, 2017 by SusanG

Last week was a short work week at the day job because I took off a couple of days. And like most short work weeks at day jobs, it meant there was just as much work as normal to get done. Fortunately, I wasn’t as exhausted from it as I could have been. That was nice. However, when it came to the weekend I was a little slow to get the whole productive weekend thing going.

I managed to get a little learning in during the week. I watched more of the texturing and materials tutorial for Maya. It was a good thing I did. And, I probably would have been better off watching more of it before starting the texturing for the Worm Guy. Not that what I did was bad or can’t be adjusted. That’s not it. The reason I would have been better off watching more of the tutorial is because it answered some of the questions or issues I ran into. Yep. Just a few videos down the road and I had an answer to why when I tried to render with Arnold the window was just black. And even a way to adjust the smoothing of things at render time instead of adding polygons to the base mesh.

It turns out there is an option under Arnold, in the Maya menu, for the Arnold view port. It also turns out that when rendering with Arnold and using said view port you get some options to setup the smoothing at render time. Oh and not only that, you can adjust your viewing angle in the Arnold render window. That’s cool. I have not tried any of it myself yet. But for sure, I will be soon.

Watching more of the tutorial wasn’t all I got done. I got started on that Funky Bird that I sketched in the meeting. You can see the progression of how it’s coming along in the pictures I’ve included. I got the base head shape done and then started adding the
neck and the body type area. While I was working on the body section, trying to get the bottom to look the right type of full I decided that ZBrush would be the best tool to do that. So I tried sending the model to ZBrush using the GoZ plugin except it wasn’t installed for the 2017 version of Maya. So, I had to install that first. Then I tried sending it over from Maya to ZBrush. That worked. I was able to make some sculpting adjustments to the shape of the lower half of the body so it’s more bulbous instead of flat. I didn’t add any sub-divisions to it or anything like that which made any sort of smoothing, even at a very low intensity level, very dramatic.

 

I ran into a snag trying to send the model back over to Maya from ZBrush. I’m not sure why. It could have been size. I had that issue with 3DS Max. Or I might not have done something right. I’m not sure. But instead of fighting it too much I just exported the
model as an .obj file and then imported it to Maya. That worked so I’m not too distressed about it not working as I expected.

Once back in Maya I decided to start on the helmet. You see in the sketch there’s a helmet on the head. And yes, it’s looking a bit cyclops like at the moment. Anyway. I knew the best and probably easiest thing I could do to make the helmet would be to duplicate the faces of the head that would make up where the helmet would cover and then I could take that and scale it and add detail to it. After I finally found the duplicate function and managed to execute it twice. I had a basic helmet the shape of the head which I could scale up just enough to add thickness. This sounds really easy. And I thought it should have been easier than it was. Well, ok the duplicating was easy. It was making the new shape a completely separate object that wasn’t. It took me quite a while to finally figure out, that when I made the duplicate Maya automatically grouped everything under the original object. It was very frustrating because I was trying to delete the extra duplicate and couldn’t do it without deleting other parts. I finally found the option to ungroup everything and now it’s all set. There will be more duplicating fun to come I have no doubt.

I did not get started on the rig for the Worm Guy. And I didn’t get the texture started for the Penguin, though, now I’m glad I didn’t. I think I may finish the texturing tutorial first. I might learn even more stuff that could be really useful, like the bit on creating layered textures. That was cool to watch.

In addition to finishing up the tutorial, I am about to the point where I need to tackle some home projects again. I’ve got some cleaning out, rearranging, painting, reorganizing and the like that I need to do. I’ve been making some false starts at it over the last couple of weeks and I am to the point that I need to either just do it, or give up the idea of doing it. I think the ‘just do it’ option will work out better. Though, that means my home is likely to look like it has been hit by an indoor tornado until it all gets done. However, as some of what I hope to do includes getting rid of some stuff, I think it will be worth it. I will try to remember to take breaks and get in some play time so there are fun pictures to share instead of just me rambling about the chaos of my home.

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That Didn’t Go The Way I Hoped

Posted on February 21, 2017 by SusanG

Remember last week when I wrote that I was in hopes that things would get back on track and I would start making a lot of progress again? That didn’t really happen the way I had hoped. Things went off the rails pretty quick after that. I suspect it was facilitated by an injury acting up and making things unpleasant. I don’t know about you but when I hurt, all bets are off.

Unfortunately for me it takes a while for me to recognize that I am hurting. I was probably hurting for a couple of weeks before it got bad enough for me to register it. And that was only because I couldn’t do a tornado kick with one foot. I could do it with the other foot but the one foot, yeah, just not happening. There is something of an interesting silver lining to this. I learned a few things and now know some things I don’t need to do or try.

For example, I had been entertaining getting a standing desk. I have a desk that I can adjust the height on. It takes some work but I can do it. So I tried raising the desk to a height that would work as a standing desk a few weeks ago. As much as I like the
aesthetic of the height, it turns out that it doesn’t work well with my body. I have some weird mechanics and such happening on one side of my body, the side that couldn’t do the kick. When I stand for very long I tend to plant that foot and leg and shift all my
weight there. Even when it hurts. So that eliminates a standing desk. Ok. One less thing on my think about list. It makes a lot of things easier when deciding how to go about setting up my work space. I also discovered a few other things that will prove to be helpful.

As a result of the pain and the desk and the like, I couldn’t really get comfortable at the
desk to work on anything new. I did spend some time playing with the materials editor and the smoothing functions in Maya. That was a good thing. I still think I could benefit from watching a couple of the comprehensive Maya tutorials so, I may start on that soon.

I had in mind to start a stuffed bunny model. But with not being able to get comfortable and work for too long, it didn’t get started. I’m still planning on starting it. Just not sure when. It may be soon. Though, the day job gave me an opportunity to come up with another character that I think will be fun to model so I may be working on that as well while I finish up with the Penguin and the Worm Guy.

I’m sure that for many people day job meetings are productive in regards to said day job. For me they can be a great doodle opportunity and I find some fun things in those doodles. This week I got to attend two meetings. The first one resulted in this guy hanging out in the shallows.

The second meeting resulted in this interesting character. The little doodle in the upper right corner of this one is what started the idea of the bigger doodle. I think that’s going to be fun to model. And the possibilities. I’m excited about this one.

I took a couple days off from the day job so that I could have a break and to take care of some of the boring administrative stuff of life. I had also hoped to get a lot further with those exciting models during that time. I haven’t so far. However, I have solved some of the issues that were getting in the way and I might even be on the way to getting to be able to do that tornado kick on that messed up side. Which means, I once again, have hopes of getting a lot of stuff started so I have fun stuff to share with you all. In addition to that I’ll be studying for a test for the day job, preparing for my black belt test, trying to figure out
what to do about business cards, having a chat with my tax guy, learning more about Maya, and who knows what else.

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Materials for the Worm Guy

Posted on February 14, 2017 by SusanG

I love it when I have a really productive week where I get something done every night, in addition to the exercise bit. I’ve had a couple of weeks in a row of that and it’s felt really good. This week started out like it was going to go that way. And then I got kicked in the head by Mother Nature. A few times. Allergy season seems to have started early. The poor trees and plants must be so confused. I know my allergies are. And unfortunately, nothing I took was helping. I’m finally getting enough relief that I can function again so hopefully I can get back on track.

I found a tutorial on materials in Maya. It’s called Maya Shading and Texturing Fundamentals. So it starts pretty basic. Which is good. And the author is pretty thorough. He’s been pretty good about covering different ways to do things. So if there are 3 ways
to apply a texture or create one or sort them, then he covers all three. I’ve got about 1.5 hours of segments to watch and given what I’ve learned so far I expect to learn even more cool stuff.

I was going to watch the rest of the tutorial before starting on some of the texturing I need to do. However, I realized that I had enough information to do what I want to do at the moment. So I took a break from the lessons and started playing with the Worm Guy.
The rigging tutorial indicated it might be better to have the textures or materials applied before doing the rig. So texturing it is.

One of the things that you can do with Maya is setup textures in the Hypershade and then once you select what you want to apply a texture to you can use the right-click menu and apply the texture from there instead of going back and forth between the Hypershade and the view port. So that’s what I did. I set up the textures and then selected my bits and applied them. I’ve had the colors for the Worm Guy in mind for a while so it was easy to set things up. There was very little fussing to be done. Though there were a couple of areas that I wasn’t sure about. The lips and the eye color. I chose a really dark blue for the eyes. For the lips I started out with a green but it looked weird so I decided a yellow-ish orange-ish color made more sense. And looks better.

I need to add some lighting I think. The default lights don’t really show the color well. A
couple of scene lights could help that a lot. This lighting issue shows in the test renders. I also found in the test renders that the geometry isn’t showing as smooth as I would like. I can’t tell yet if I’m doing something wrong or just haven’t found the right setting or if I’m not rendering correctly. If I would watch one of the longer tutorials where they do a big project I might learn that. Hmm. I might also learn about using the Arnold renderer. Hmm. Hmm.

For now I used what smoothing I could find and found a setting that is better. It’s not as nice as I would like. But it’s getting there. I haven’t done much with the render settings so there may be some things in there that will help. I did try the different renderer options. That was interesting. Arnold just rendered a black scene. I think I might need lights for that renderer, or a camera. Not sure yet. Oh, but I found one that is a Maya vector renderer. That was really cool. It not only looks cool. It gives me a whole other way to consider rendering my scenes. What do you think? I like the Worm Guy rendered in vector art.

That was the excitement of the week. At least the good stuff. There was some over-run from the day job into my weekend but that’s ok. It’s just part of it. And at least it wasn’t something that felt like a waste of time, like a meeting. There might be a little over-run a day or two this week. But with some luck it won’t be too bad. I should be able to get some lights in the scene for the Worm Guy. If I get real ambitious, and don’t get sidelined by allergies, I might get the rig started for him. I’ve also got a Penguin that needs textures. I already added lights for that one. And no rig needed for now. So some nice textures and a background maybe and I should have the Penguin all ready. And of course there is the next model to start on. Lots to look forward too. It will be interesting to see, what, and, how much, gets done.

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A Penguin, A Worm, and a 3D Printer

Posted on February 7, 2017 by SusanG

That pretty much sums up my week. Aside from the day job and the exercise bits anyway.

I worked on the Penguin very diligently this week. In addition to adding the eyelids and the eyeballs, I added some edge loops to help sharpen things up and create some distinction around the beak. I also added some edge loops on the feet to make the bones on the top stand out a little more. At that point, when I applied the smooth feature to the body I found areas that were a bit lumpy. I tried just moving the vertices on my own but that wasn’t working very well. Maya, has some sculpting tools built in now. So, to fix the lumpy, I went to find the sculpting brush. It took me a couple of tries to get it set up. But, once it was set up, it worked like a champ. Very handy.

The Penguin has more oval eyes that just round ones, I did this to fit the look. I’m not so sure it’s true to life. But it’s what looked good in the space. When I first did a test render of the model with the eyes and no material, it looked really weird. And it was difficult to see the eyes. To fix that I added some materials. Nothing fancy just, something to make it stand out and then to make the eyes stand out from the body. The whole thing rendered really dark at first so to fix that I added a couple of lights. That makes for a pretty full week. I learned, or figured out, how to add a basic material and how to add and edit some lights. 
With the Penguin modeled and time still left in my week I decided it was time to finish the modeling on the Worm Guy. The Worm got some of the same treatment as the Penguin though he didn’t need any areas to be sharpened up so no extra edge loops. He did need some smoothing with the sculpting brush. I left the Worm’s eyes basically round. I did a little shaping to get a nice iris look. And of course he is a little cross-eyed so I had to angle them just a bit inwards. I think he’s kind of cute.

Next up for the Penguin is proper materials. I may try painting on it. When I was looking
for the sculpting brush in Maya I saw something that looks like I can paint directly on my model. So I might try that. For the Worm Guy, in addition to the materials, the next thing is a simple rig that will allow me to bend him into the pose that I want without completely deforming into a mass of muck. That is the reason for a rig as far as I’m concerned.

And yes. The 3D printer has finally arrived. I ordered it over the previous weekend and it arrived on Friday. Bonus, it arrived after I got home from the hair cut so I didn’t have to worry about it sitting out front or anything like that. I did have to get it out of the box and test it first thing. Unfortunately, I neglected to read the assembly instructions first and I managed to take a chunk of skin out of my knuckle. Once assembled and properly adjusted I loaded up one of the test files that came with it and gave it a test print. I think it took about 2 and a half to 3 hours. The PLA stinks a little. I think it’s the PLA filament. It could just be the components burning off their new-ness. I think it was a little better for the second test print which I did on Saturday. At this point I think it will have to wait until the weekend for me to check. As long as those things took to print I don’t expect to be printing during the week much.

The next step for the printer is, I need to download and learn the slicer software that will allow me to convert my 3D models to code that the printer can read.

So. Full week. We’ll see how this next one goes. It looks like it may be time for more tutorials. Oh, and I need to start a new model. We’ll have to see what that will be. I’ve a couple of ideas.

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Back to the Penguin

Posted on January 31, 2017 by SusanG

That was sort of a full week. At least it felt like it was. That was probably due to some events at the day job that might end up impacting some of my after day job time. It’s ok it will be a good thing. In addition to that, I did finish up that rigging tutorial for Maya. And the next day Pluralsight released a new tutorial by the same author/instructor covering walk cycles in Maya. That’s kind of exciting to me.

I know, my idea of exciting is a little strange to some. But, here’s why it’s exciting to me. One of the things that I let get in the way of working on a Sticks animation was that I wanted, or thought I needed, to figure out how to create a walk cycle for Sticks so that I
didn’t have to animate every single step every time. I figure there has to be a way to create the walk cycle and then set it up so that you can move him along a path and he will automatically walk. I couldn’t find anything for 3DS Max that explained it. Not in the places I was looking, anyway. So to have this tutorial pop up is just cool.

Oh, yeah, I’m becoming a bit of a Maya fan by the way. Between finding a way to create and animate the eyelids the way I want and now the availability of the walk cycle tutorial I’m liking what I can do with it more and more. I haven’t started applying materials yet so that could change things some. But at this point Maya is really becoming my go to. I know I should be able to do all the same stuff in 3DS Max, but they are being presented in a way that they seem so much easier in Maya. I might even import some of my 3DS Max files to Maya so I have the models to work with there.

Watching the rigging tutorial has influenced some of my thinking on how to approach modeling my characters. For a while I was thinking that I need to go back and completely rework the Worm again. I’ve since made a different decision on that. The only reason I was going to rework the Worm was to make it possible to animate the mouth. I’ve decided I won’t worry about the mouth. I will rig the Worm for the body for sure so that I can bend him to the pose I want more easily. And I might rig the eyes. With the rigging tutorial in mind, and because I hadn’t got the beak done on the Penguin I decided to approach the beak in a manner that should make it possible to animate it.

Since I want the beak to be able to be animated on the Penguin I decided to start the beak over. Instead of using the piece I had started, I hid it, just in case I changed my mind, and took a different approach. I selected some of the faces on the face and extruded them. Instead of adding on to the object already there, I am creating the beak from part of it. I started with the top bill and got it shaped up and then I added the bottom bill. And yes, I had to give it a tongue. The tongue won’t be able to be animated. It will just show up when the mouth is open. I would have to handle it different than I did if I want to animate it and that’s likely to be a little more complicated than what I am prepared for.

I’ve put the work in progress pictures of the Penguin all throughout this post instead of
just putting a bunch of pictures all right together. The last one is the current state of the Penguin model. As you can see I’m up to the point of needing to add in the eyes and then work on the eyelids. Yep. I’m going to finally give the poor thing something to see with. Who knows, I might do that with the Worm Guy too.

There is one thing on the Penguin that I’m not going to correct yet. I kind of need it in a T pose because that makes it easier to setup the rig for the arms, or in this case the flippers. I considered fixing it so that I could do that and I probably will later. For now, I don’t really need to animate the Penguin or even change its pose. Later, I might decide to animate it or change its pose and at that point I’ll look into adjusting the flippers to a T pose and then creating a rig.

I think I need to find something on adding materials in Maya really soon. It looks like I might have my models to the point of needing them. And I’m getting close to starting a rig. We’ll see how this week goes and what sort of progress I make. I do want to finish watching the walk cycle tutorial, even though I don’t need it yet, so that could impact the amount of time I have for modeling. It should be fun to see what I get done.

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