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.
work to do on both models that didn’t involve the eyes. I worked on the Worm Guy. I got his teeth in and made some lip and tongue adjustments. And then I did the cut and mirror part. The cut and mirror took a couple of tries because when I modeled the mouth area I ended up moving some of the center vertices in the x axis some so that they were no longer right at the zero point. What that meant was that when I mirrored and connected, some vertices didn’t merge together and I ended up with gaps. So I had to undo and go in and adjust things. That was a little tricky because of the number of vertices all sitting on top of each other for one reason or another. A
couple of times I thought I had it right so I did the mirror and it looked fine until I did the smooth function and found I had these nice little wells. So I had to undo and go back and fix it again. Finally I got it to work and I think he looks pretty good so far. Here are the work in progress shots for this week. Remember; I’m not doing eyes and eye lids until I finish watching the “Introduction to Rigging in Maya 2017” course on Pluralsight.
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.
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.