It’s Always Time to Get Busy

Posted on January 17, 2017 by SusanG

I made a bit of progress on a couple of things last week. And as always, after I figured out something and realized where it was going and what I might need to do about it, my thoughts were; “Time to get busy.” It seems like it’s always time to get busy.

By ‘getting busy’ I generally mean that it’s time for me to really focus on whatever it is that I need to do to make the next thing happen. It’s not that I haven’t been working on those things. I have. It’s just that some of it takes on a little more import and urgency in the need to get it done.

So what did I figure out? First. I am going to have to change my hosting plan to one that is specifically configured for WordPress so that the site loads more quickly for everyone, at least as a start. I also figured out that the latest WordPress theme for 2017 allows me to create a nice portfolio as well as handling an animation in the header. Which means I will probably want to go ahead and use WordPress for my SusanG Productions website. Right now it’s just a static webpage with links. But the header is too big and doesn’t show up on mobile devices. Using WordPress I can better gauge how things will appear on different devices even before I post it. And WordPress is pretty robust so as things grow I will be able to make additions to the site if I need to.

And yes, that WordPress hosting will include hosting for this site. I know it’s not the fastest to load. I find it a challenge some days myself. So I want to do something about that. And if I expect you or anyone else to come visit on a regular basis, I need to do something about that. I’m not really looking forward to the idea of moving everything again. But, there is the possibility that I won’t have to. My hosting company might have a way to automate that. Then again, it could have the site down for a few hours while it gets done. I’m not sure yet. I still need to call about that.

That brings me back to it being ‘time to get busy’. I have all the website pieces to get taken care of and part of that includes having content to go up on them as well as needing artwork. Some of that artwork requires I have characters modeled and ready to pose. I also need those characters for business cards, so the characters are what I need to get busy working on and finishing up. Fortunately, slow though it seems to be, I am making progress.

That progress for this week was on one of the characters I’ve been modeling. The Worm Guy is coming along. I was looking at what I had so far, trying to decide if I was ready to do the slice and mirror when I decided I needed to do more work on the mouth area. So the Worm got some lips and a tongue and I’ve got a section prepped as a place to add some teeth. Here are a few of the work in progress pictures.

 

Before I do the slice and mirror, I will finish the teeth and probably add the eye. I want to add the eye before the mirror in case I end up making changes to the main part of the Worm to get the eye ball to fit right. That way I won’t have to try to make matching adjustments on the other side.

I am still not sure if I want the Worm Guy to have arms or not. I was trying to decide what to do about that and finally landed on a solution. Once I have more of the rough detail complete on the one side, I’m going to save the Worm as a different scene and project and use that if I decide to give him arms. It should make things easier. Of course, both will need to be rigged but the rig with the arms will be a little different than the rig without. That’s something I’ll need to learn pretty soon. Rigging in Maya.

Guess I better get to work on modeling and figure out when and where I’m going to fit those Maya rigging lessons in. And, it’s looking like I need to go chase off the pack of squirrels running around my home, again. I’ll see you next week.

Posted in Weekly Updates | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on It’s Always Time to Get Busy

Preparing to Chase Squirrels

Posted on January 10, 2017 by SusanG

It’s time for me to think about website maintenance. There are some issues with this website and another website I have that I have been aware of, or at least suspected since I changed my hosting. And as a result of a test I was able to run I have identified an issue with the SusanG Productions website. Now it’s time to do something about, at least some of it.

I’ve been putting off doing this website maintenance because I expect it to take a significant amount of time. It’s a major squirrel chase. Some of the things I’m looking at are trying to optimize the two WordPress sites, this is one of them, so that they load faster. When I changed my hosting type I chose the Cpanel hosting not the dedicated WordPress hosting. I knew it was a risk but there are a few things about the WordPress hosting that I wasn’t sure about and I wanted a little more control. Of course, I may be seeing the results of that decision now. I usually post a lot of pictures in my articles and they impact the load time of the site, as does the WordPress theme.

Some of the things I need and want to look at for the two existing WordPress sites are new themes that might be a bit more light weight and will load faster. I will also double check any plug-ins I have installed and make sure I’m using them. If not I think I will delete them. As a last resort, I could load up a test copy of another CMS (content management system), to see if it loads better. I’m not expecting that to be the solution I go with, for a few reasons. The first being the increase in my workload just for maintenance. WordPress is at least pretty automated, or automatable with it’s installation of application updates as well as theme and plug-in updates. The other CMS that I know about weren’t nearly as user friendly the last time I tried them. Another reason is the work involved in moving from one CMS platform to another. I did that once and it was time consuming and somewhat painful. I’m not sure I want to go through that again if I don’t have to. I would rather do what I have to do to move the sites to dedicated WordPress hosting and pay more for it. It’s a better use of my time.

Wouldn’t you rather see pictures and animation videos here than read about my trying to figure out how to make something work on the website? I would think so. They are much more fun. Not any less challenging or frustrating mind you. Still, more fun.

Speaking of challenging. So you saw the animation I posted last week. I shared it with several people and a few of them mentioned that Sticks looks like he’s reverse moon-walking. Ok. I gotta fix that. A very observant young woman, with whom I take Taekwondo, pointed out that I forgot to have him lift his leg before moving it forward. I have noted that as something I need to fix. Or, figure out how to fix. It might be a while before I have a correction and something more to post of the animation. So stay tuned.

I’m mostly working on modeling some additional characters. I want a few for my business cards and as that is the next thing due after I test for my black belt, I think that’s a bit more pressing and important than making Sticks play with the Snowman.

I still haven’t decided what I want to do about the beak for the Penguin and I need to address the eyes as well. Since I was still thinking on that when I decided to work on modeling I went back to the Worm_Guy. The Maya version of him. I like the overall look of the body better so I’ll work from it. I pulled up a picture of it and found that the eye sockets didn’t really have the open and happy and devilish look I want them too have. They looked a bit mean. So that’s what I worked on. In these pictures you can see the right side is the one I worked on and made more open and big. Compared to the left it’s much more inviting. Once I finish with that and some other refining I was working on, I will delete the left half and mirror it over and connect it all back together again.

   

The Worm_Guy was the only modeling progress for this week. But the nice thing was, with the new method of prioritizing or scheduling work, I didn’t feel bad about going to bed early a couple of nights last week. And that’s a good thing.

I’ll try to keep you updated, on the website progress so you can see if you notice any difference. Of course, I will have to work it in with the modeling and since that is so much more fun, it may take some time before I have website news for you.

Posted in Weekly Updates | Tagged , , , | Comments Off on Preparing to Chase Squirrels

Oh Look, A New Year

Posted on January 3, 2017 by SusanG

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.

Posted in Weekly Updates | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Oh Look, A New Year

It’s the Holidays

Posted on December 27, 2016 by SusanG

When I sat down to write the update for this week I realized, in spite of best intentions and expectations, I had not yet had a chance to spend time playing with my toys. The digital ones and artistic ones that is. I did do a little Lego play and I finished reading a couple of books I have been working on.

Speaking of books. This is what I got for myself as a gift for the season. I haven’t really gotten into it yet. I just skimmed it a bit. I think it’s going to be really interesting. Since, I have a several stacks of books to read I’m not sure how quickly I will get to it.

I also finished up the Lego Advent calendar. For Christmas Eve I got a Santa figure. It was fun to put it all together and have something new to try each day.

I have been struggling for a while with my work space / play room. I can’t seem to get it arranged right with the right lighting and furniture and all that. As a result I am intermittently productive. I will have few days or weeks that I will get a lot of work
done on a project, either digital or regular art. And then I have a lot more days that I barely get anything done. It’s been a little frustrating. Once I painted my music room and my entry hall, I realized that part of the problem is the color of the walls. I have these tan sort of walls pretty much all over my condo. While I’m grateful they aren’t white, because white walls make me crazy, the color is really boring and uninspiring. It’s a buzz kill for sure. I’ve finally chosen some colors for the room but it’s going to be a big job just to clear the it enough to do the painting. So I’m not quite ready to start that. In the mean time I’ve been working on adding entertaining bits to the room. Little things that make it more interesting and that add some color.

As part of my decorations, I decided I needed some desk accessories. So I made them. There are lots of things that Lego bricks are good for. Here, they make a nice pencil holder and a nice sticky pad holder. I could also use a holder for some scratch paper I have. I was hoping it would fit in the holder for the sticky pads but since it didn’t, I guess, I’ll need to make something for that.

I have a couple of extra days off from the day job in addition to the Holiday days. I have a few plans for them. I still have Taekwondo on one of those days and the other day I’ll be stuck at home waiting for some inspectors for my A/C system, and I’m helping cat sit for a neighbor. Aside from that, I haven’t nailed down what I’m going to do with the time. There are a few things I could do, and might. Like, once I create the foot for the Penguin I need to attach the beak to the head to make it all one piece. Oh, and it needs eyes. Of course I’ll also need to mirror over everything from the one side to the other. I’ve also got that little Sticks piece to work on. It needs some movement. Maybe I’ll get started on that. And you know, since you haven’t seen a finished shot of either one, I still have both the Ovation Guitar painting and the Gretsch Guitar painting to work on. Neither of them are
anywhere near finish. None of that even touches the chores, home tasks, or even planning tasks for my projects. Oh. That’s something I think would be good to work on for the next week; reviewing what I got done this year and think about what I want to do for next year. It’s coming up pretty quick.

Here’s wishing you all a very happy and prosperous New Year.

Posted in Weekly Updates | Tagged , | Comments Off on It’s the Holidays

Still Playing With My Toys

Posted on December 20, 2016 by SusanG

I’m not done playing yet. Just because I don’t have quite as much to show for what I did with my toys last week doesn’t mean I’m done playing with them. I just had a few more things I wanted to play with.

I finished setting the scene for Sticks and Snowman. I added the last bit of accessories to the scene. So now there is a present, a holiday ornament, and a Santa hat to work with. I also added a sky or background sort of thing. And a light. I added an overhead light to act like a sun. None of the pieces required any real modeling, at least so far. I did have to scale the ornament down but that was it. Now the scene is ready for me to start animating Sticks. I thought I was going to start on that during the week but didn’t feel that having 30 minutes or an hour was going to be enough time to really work on it. Instead I left it to the weekend but somehow I still didn’t get started. I might be just a little overwhelmed. For just the little bit I did, and then had to remove, I have already figured out that for as small a thing as I want to do, it’s probably going to be a lot of work and take a fair amount of time. At least it’s all prepared for when I finally get up the courage to start it.

Since I still wanted to play during the week, but wasn’t quite ready to work on the animating, I decided to work on the Penguin a little more. He needs a leg and a foot. I started working on the leg, trying to get something a bit roundish and stumpy. It’s
getting close but I think it will need a little more work.

I was going to work on the foot too but I realized I needed a better idea of what a penguin foot looks like. To figure that out I used Google to pull up some pictures. I don’t really want the standard cartoon flipper feet. Though I’m not sure a realistically modeled foot will look right either. I think I want something in between. But that could change by the time I start modeling the foot.In addition to playing with my digital toys, I spent some time with the Lego. I got the first set I had been working on, built. I had the one building to finish as well as the toy machine and some elves. That one is now all done. I still have one more set to put together. I’m not entirely sure I will get it done before the weekend. If not, I might save it for next year. I have continued to work on the Advent calendar items. They tend to be much smaller and easier to tackle in a few minutes. Of course, at the moment I’m a day or two behind but it is coming together.

I’m looking forward to the Holiday weekend coming up. I don’t have my Taekwondo class on Saturday so the staying home in the pj’s and playing with the toys on Saturday is sounding like a pretty good plan. Not sure that’s the plan I will stick with. My parents,
who were very helpful with painting and other projects around my place over the summer and fall, have finally got their new home and they get their furniture delivered this week so I could go up and see the new place and possibly help with the unpacking. Even with that, I expect I’ll find a bit of time to play with the Penguin and Sticks and who knows, I could start on another toy.

Posted in Weekly Updates | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Still Playing With My Toys