Playing With My Toys

Posted on December 13, 2016 by SusanG

I’m going to try to keep this fairly quick so I can get back to playing with my toys. No not the Lego bricks. Though I have some of those to work on too. Nope. I had a whim floating around in my head and I decided to do something about it.

I was thinking it would be fun to do a scene with Sticks and my Snowman and make it something with a bit of Christmas or Winter feel to it. Of course, since they are both in 3DS Max I went back to that to work on this. I’m not giving up on Maya. I was just too lazy to try to export everything in a format that it would work in Maya. I’ll probably be doing it at some point though. For now, I decided to stay in 3DS Max.

I started with a scene that had Sticks already rigged, and apparently with some animation. I saved it as a new file and then imported and merged the Snowman, the tree, and the Santa hat. Nice to have some toys to play with. From there I added a ground plane. Because Sticks was already in the scene, all his materials were there but I decided to change them. I didn’t want him all dark looking for a holiday scene so I gave him a new look. Then I had to figure out what to do about the Snowman since I pulled him with no materials assigned. He turned out to be pretty easy. And a little fun. This way he doesn’t look exactly as he does in some other scenes. It’s like a different set of clothes.

As you can see, I haven’t really done a lot of modeling with this. Just for the ground. At the moment, I’m not planning on much more modeling. I expect to put all the work into the animating. Yep. Animating. I’ve decided to try to make Sticks walk over and do something with the Snowman or maybe the Santa hat, or maybe both. It’s sort of a big thing. But as I’m just goofing around I’ll at least have some fun with it. I had to repose Sticks to a good starting pose and then I moved him to where I want him to start moving from. Then I started trying to animate the walk. I set a key frame and then moved to a different frame and made my first adjustments and set a key frame and moved to another frame and so on. I did this for about 4 key frames. Now I know that doesn’t sound like a lot but trust me I moved quite a few things each time. After I had a few key frames in place I wanted to see how it was looking. It was looking good except that he seemed to keep moving and doing more. Weird.

So remember I said I started with a scene of Sticks that had some animation in it? Yeah. I had to go find it and delete all the keys. I might have been able to delete it on each object that got changed by that would have taken a lot of clicks. So I found a graph or something of it and was able to delete all key frames. Of course that meant I lost the work I had just done. Oh well. I tried again. This time I didn’t get as far before I figured out that Sticks was floating above the ground. Since Sticks isn’t meant to be a Sorcerer in this scene, I had to delete all the key frames and then set Sticks with his feet on the ground. And here we are now. Ready to once again, start animating the scene.

Before I get back to animating this, I think I’m going to take a moment and put in a sky of some sort. And I may add a present or two and maybe an ornament as well. Oh. And lights. I’m thinking I want them all in the scene from the beginning instead of adding them later and hoping that they appear in every frame. Because, I’m not so sure they would.

One of the things I realized as I was playing with my toys is that, I don’t have that many toys to be playing with. I guess I need to get busy making more toys.

I’m going to go play now. Bye. See you later.

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This Needs a Title

Posted on December 6, 2016 by SusanG

Even though last week was technically a short week for me at the day job, it felt long and busy. That seems to be the way things go. That first week back after time off, even a fairly short amount of time, is always a little rough. For me it meant that I didn’t get to play until the weekend. I wanted to. But it seemed like all the time kept running together and I was at the end of my day before I even knew it.

I didn’t get to work on either of the paintings. I looked at the Ovation one a few times, but honestly, by the time I did look at it, my eyes were starting to blur and I wouldn’t have been able to see the dots as I put them down on the canvas. It probably didn’t help that the weather was in flux all week. I seem to be a bit of a human barometer and so weather and seasonal changes tend to play havoc with my head.

penguin_12022016c_c_wmThe weather finally settled a little on Friday and my head cleared so I was finally able to enjoy playing on the computer. I worked on the Penguin a little more. I gave it a body and shaped that up a bit. Then on Saturday morning, instead of doing what I needed to, I worked on the Penguin even more. Now it’s got a wing, or flipper. I think it’s a flipper. That took some real fiddling. I was concerned that it was sticking too far away from the body and that the body wasn’t the right shape to let the flipper fit in closer so I kept trying to adjust that. Then I happened to glance at the picture that is my inspiration for the Penguin and realized that the flippers are a bit out from the body as well.

Even though, when I shape the body and the head I shape both sides, for the details I am only creating them on the one side, like the eye socket, and the flipper. It will be the same with the leg and foot. I’m doing that because what Ipenguin_12022016f_c_wm will do once I have all the basic parts in, is delete the half that isn’t detailed and then mirror the detailed half and combine the two meshes at that point. That way I don’t have to worry about getting the symmetry right. Then, of course, with the basic symmetry created I can go back in and make things a little more asymmetric.

One of the things I discovered that I really like about creating in Maya is how easy it is to smooth an object and then still make adjustments to it. You can do it in 3DS Max, however, you have to do a couple of other steps to be able to do it without making a mess of the mesh and even then, the number of edges and vertices that you have to pick through to move things around makes it challenging and slightly frustrating. Or more specifically, eye crossing and headache inducing.

At some point, after I worked on the Penguin for a while, I realized that I might have been able to use a cube as the base primitive for the body instead of a cylinder. It might have worked better. Maybe. As it is I used a cylinder and tried to match it up to the sphere for the head. However, I ran into a small problem when I tried to bridge the edges for the two. I had created a couple of edge loops on the head to get a little more flexibility and detail in the modeling. This meant that when I tried to bridge the edges by selecting the ring set from the body and the ring set for the neck in the head, it wouldn’t work. It took a while to figure out that it was because there weren’t the same number of edges. For one there were 20 and the other 22. I hope to not make that mistake again soon.

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20161203_202421_c_sBesides working on the computer art; I decided to work a little more on my holiday decorations. As you can see, one of them is a Lego Advent Calendar. That’s been fun. As a kid, my parents got us the Advent Calendars with chocolate so when I saw the Lego one,
I decided I really wanted one for this year. It’s been fun opening the windows and seeing what I get to build with the little packet of Lego bricks. I got the next section of the Santa’s Workshop set built. Next up is part 3 which looks a little larger. Originally I was going to put up a tree and put the Lego stuff under it. I may still do that, however, I am considering not bothering with the tree and just having the Lego sets.

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I’m not sure how this week will go. There is a training thing at the day job that will run a little later than I normally work so that will up end the schedule for one day for sure. There is also a haircut on Friday. (Hair 453 needs to be trimmed.) And to go with all that, the weather is still changing. Even so, I expect to be able to carve out some time to give the Penguin a leg and foot and work on the rest of the Lego set. Maybe I will even make some time to work on a painting as well.

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Another Vacation Over

Posted on November 29, 2016 by SusanG

Sigh. Another vacation has come to an end. I would say this was a successful and somewhat satisfying vacation. That’s not always an easy thing for me to accomplish. I usually have a whole list of things I want to get done while on vacation and if I’m lucky about 3 of those things do actually get done. This one was a bit of an exception. That is in part due to the help of my Dad who assisted in the completion of a number of projects around my home at the beginning of my vacation time. That left me with very few things
that I kept thinking I “should” be doing instead of whatever I was doing. It’s a bit of an odd feeling. Kind of nice, though.

So I started my time off from the day job with technicians in my home replacing my air conditioning system. It’s not a process that is very conducive to study or learning so game playing and dot placing were my main activities on those days.

I did get more dots placed on the Ovation guitar painting. I have even, I think, figured out the problem with the vibrancy of the flame red as compared to the crimson. It’s a dot density problem. If I make the dots more dense then the color gets more vibrant. With that in mind I have mainly focused on getting the crimson pattern down on the canvas. I will 20161127_213320_c_sm_wmadd the flame red after. I am considering, after the flame red goes in, to do a thin layer of all flame red across the entire red body, even over the crimson. Not enough to over power the crimson, just to blend it all together. If I do that, I think I will use a very tiny pen point so that it’s more like a haze. I’m going to wait until I get the rest of the crimson and all the flame red done before I decide.

One thing about getting the crimson dots denser is that it has made me aware that the wood looking leaves around the sound holes may need some additional density as well. I thought I had them more dense than they are turning out to be. This may be a little bit
of a pain since those colors had to be mixed. And no, I didn’t write down what I did to get it. So that’s going to be fun.

I’ve started working on my holiday decorations. I haven’t got very far. But at least I’ve started.

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Last week I mentioned that I had decided to take this time in between card projects to start learning Maya. I have begun doing just that. I started out with some tutorials to get a feel for it and refresh my understanding of the interface. It’s a little different than 3DS Max. From there I watched a beginning tutorial on character modeling in Maya. That got me enough information to try to tackle my Worm Guy concept. I had already decided I was going to have to start over on it in ZBrush so I figured Maya would be a good program to try him in instead. At least for the moment. I may still take him back to ZBrush. For now, he’s in Maya. And this is as far as I have gotten with him.

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Not long after I closed out of the Worm project and sent off renders to share with family, I decided I wasn’t done playing. I opened Maya back up and started on another character penguin_11272016b_c_sm_wmthat I have had in mind to work on. That could be a good sign for Maya. Or just for my getting busy. Either way, I’m starting on a Penguin character. More of an interpretation as opposed to an entirely realistic look. It will be more suited to a cartoon than a nature documentary. I’ve had it in mind for almost a year. It’s inspired by a holiday card I received. Working on the Penguin is where I ran into my most frustrating moment in Maya so far. After I puffed the cheek out to give it chubby cheeks, I needed to be able to see just the head part and not the beak bits. It took me a penguin_11272016a_c_sm_wmlot of searching to find the ‘isolate’ option so that I could isolate just the head and not see the rest. I finally found it but I think I went through all the menus and a few twice so I’m not sure I will remember where it is the next time I need it.

One of the things I do like about Maya is the ability to smooth everything out and then un-smooth it to go back to working on it just by hitting some keys on the keyboard. I find this feature very convenient. I have not used the Arnold renderer yet. These are all rendered with the Maya Hardware 2.0 renderer. It was easier to set up for quick W.I.P. pictures.

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I did say I would try to address the question of ‘why learn Maya after so much time investment in 3DS Max’. Mostly it’s personal and experimental. There are legitimate industry reasons. Maya tends to be used more in animated films where 3DS Max is more often used for games, architectural rendering, and some VFX work, at least from what I remember. Since I am working and learning entirely independent of industry and can use any program I want, at the moment the industry reasons don’t matter, much. Now, the part where Maya has a bit of a reputation for being more of a creative artist tool versus an engineer artist tool. That, has a little more impact. Oh, ok. Industry does have a little influence, but not too much. The creative artist tool part is a big reason for me wanting to learn Maya. I am hoping to find a tool that bridges the gap between what I have training in, though some what dated, the more ridged thinking associated with engineering and what I want, something more free flowing and unexpectedly creative. That would be the 3D sculpting programs such as ZBrush and Mudbox. With it’s different interface and approach to tools, transformations and deformations and how models are built, I think it could do that. That in turn could help me get to where I can more comfortably and maybe more quickly, create. Create characters and scenes and hopefully even some animations. So that’s the why for me, for learning Maya.

With such a satisfying and successful vacation done, I’m really hoping to see some of the momentum continue as I get back to the day job. I’ve picked up a good bit of progress on the Ovation painting and have a plan and approach to the next steps with it. I’ve started working in Maya and making pretty good progress for about 3 evening’s worth of work. And to go with that I’ve got the beginnings of an idea for another card that I might try to do in Maya instead of 3DS Max. In addition to all that and the air conditioning installation, I finished reading two books. Which, while it doesn’t put much of a dent in my reading stacks it still feels good. Oh, and I managed to see a movie. Whew. Wonder what the next week will hold.

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Time to Learn Something New

Posted on November 22, 2016 by SusanG

This week has been about getting home projects finished up. I finished the grout in the shower last weekend and during the week I did the caulking in the corners and was finally able to use the shower again this past weekend. I was sure happy to finally have that one completely done.

This weekend was spent primarily working on home projects. Once again, thanks to my Dad who came over both Saturday and Sunday to help. Saturday,we installed new quarter round trim in the kitchen on the floor next to the cabinets. For some reason I thought that would be a fairly easy project. It wasn’t. It turned out to be a really big pain. I forgot to put on my knee pads so my knees are bruised and I got in a fight with the claw end of my hammer and managed to ding my thumb pretty good. But we did finally prevail and it’s done and looks so much better. Sunday was a trip to IKEA for some shelves for the music room. That project wasn’t too bad. The shelves when together pretty easy and we got them in place without tripping over guitars or anything else. For now I think the home projects, that I’m willing to tackle, are done. Until, I decide to work on the studio. I’ve got a color picked out for the walls so I could start the painting bit. But I think I will take a break for a while.

As I am still in between computer art projects I’ve been working on the Ovation guitar painting. It’s coming along. I got the leaves around the sound holes filled in. I was really pleased with the last of the darker browns. I was able to get really close to the color on the guitar. Of course, since I only had the one place to use it, I mixed too much. Oh well. I did pretty good getting the lightest color. It was really light and so for each layer I made it a little darker. This should give it some depth, I hope.

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As I was looking at the leaves and comparing them to my reference pictures, I once again, figured out that the shoulder wasn’t right so I adjusted the curve again. The bad thing about doing that was that it meant I needed to go back in and fill that area with the first two color layers and try to match them up. I’m not sure how well I’ve done that and I’m hoping to mask it better as I continue to work on it. Since I had the crimson and flame red out to fill that new area I decided to try working on the quilted finish look. I’m a bit surprised. I think I’m going to be able to do it. The only problem I’m running into is the flame red looks dull next to the crimson for some reason. It doesn’t have the vibrancy it needs. I’m not quite sure what to do about that. It will take some thought.

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I know I’ve mentioned before wanting to learn Maya better so I can start doing some of the modeling in it. I keep thinking and saying that. And when I think about it, I’m usually in the middle of a project or two already. And one of those might have some sort of deadline on it. When that is the case, it’s much easier to just default to the familiar and continue on. Right now, though, I’m not in the middle of a 3D art project. I have a few that I was working on but have reached a point where I kind of need to start over, or take a different approach. When I realized that, I decided that this would be a good time to work on learning Maya again. So I’ve started watching some tutorials again and I’m hoping to actually start working on something later this week.

In preparation for learning Maya, I downloaded and installed Maya 2017. As I was watching one of the tutorials they mentioned rendering in Arnold. I was thinking why would they talk about that, it’s a different application and this is supposed to be just
about Maya. It turns out, one of the lovely new features in Maya 2017 is the integration of Arnold as a built in renderer option. Cool. And yet, one more thing to learn. That’s about as far as I’ve made it with the tutorials though. I’ve a few more in the one lesson I’m watching and then I’ve marked a bigger one to watch next. At some point I’ll get brave enough to try to model something on my own in Maya.

For those who might be wondering why I would be trying to learn Maya if I’m still learning 3DS Max and ZBrush, I have a couple of reasons for this. One, is that they each have things they do very well and usually better than the other programs. There is also a difference in which industries use which programs most. I’ll try to cover more on the differences and reasons in a future post.

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Now That That’s Done

Posted on November 15, 2016 by SusanG

No, I’m not referring to last week’s Presidential election in the United States. Technically, that won’t be done until December 19th when the Electoral College meets. What is finally done is the grout in my shower. Ok, I do still have to caulk, but the grout is in. The really big messy work is done.

Once again, thanks to my Dad who came over and assisted in a very messy endeavor. His help made a big difference in the amount of time it took. Which, made a difference in getting the whole thing completed in one afternoon rather than doing it over a few days.
And because of that, if I get the caulking done early enough this week, I might be getting to use my master shower again come the weekend. First I’ll need to find a shower curtain and liner.

Though I didn’t really expect to get a lot of art done last week, I didn’t expect my volume of work to be so dismally small. It took a while but I did get some work done. I filled in the two browns on the leaves more so they are nice and dense and then having noted that the black of the sound holes was looking a little weak I filled in those more densely. That helped a lot. While I was at it I also made the lines or veins running through the leaves more dense so they show up better again. As I was looking at my reference photo I realized that I left off the button for the strap so I sketched it in and have started filling it in. Some work in progress pictures for your viewing pleasure.

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Last week I mentioned that my Adobe Creative Cloud Suite was updated and that I got a cool new application with it, the Character Animator. I opened that up and tested it out a bit by watching the first tutorial. It might be more fun to play with if I could use one of my own characters. I need to learn more about it to figure out how to do that. The way it works, it uses your camera and microphone to help map the face of the character to animate and synchronize it with your facial movements and speech , from what I’ve seen so far. There are also ways to use keyboard controls to do other actions. I’m not really sure how that works yet. I only spent about 20 minutes playing with it.

I made a little bit of progress on that housekeeping I mentioned last week. I did a little research on updating my Autodesk software. I think I’ll just update it for now and when the renewal comes up in April, I’ll look into if I need to change my subscription to a different type. Of course, updating some of the software means I’ll need to reconfigure my GoZ plug-in in ZBrush. Oh well, I already need to do it for Photoshop.

Every week, I have the same intentions of getting more done. Whether it’s work on a painting or work on a computer art project or even learning some new something I need for bettering my work. I have the same intentions for this next week, though I know they
will be thwarted by something. Even though the grout is done there are plenty of other things to distract and derail me. Still, I will make a solid effort so I recommend checking back to see what sort of progress I do make.

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