Changing Expectations, Again – July 12, 2016

Posted on July 12, 2016 by SusanG

Have you ever noticed how short work weeks seem to warp the time continuum? At least they do for me. I’ve had a series of short weeks back to back to back and this is the first week that will be relatively normal. I think. But it’s early so that could change for sure. Still, now that I’ve adjusted something that I didn’t realize was not right, I think I might have a chance of getting back into some sort of groove. I’m hoping for it to be a creative and productive groove.

I want to touch on the texturing thing a bit more. I noted in the last post that I need to re-think or re-evaluate some things. What I realized I needed to re-evaluate is my expectations when it comes to using programs designed for texturing 3d models. For
some reason I expected it to be very plug and play, one click, easy. I didn’t expect to need to learn a whole new layout, and a new methodology. Silly, I know. But I just didn’t expect that. What I have come to realize or accept, is that, to get really good custom textures, regardless of the method, I am going to need to put as much effort into understanding which ever tool I use for that, as I have had to put into learning and understanding the tools I use to create 3d models.

Keeping that in mind, I am still evaluating Substance Painter. It seems that this is rapidly becoming an industry standard for textures in games. This is because of the PBR shaders that can be created with it and can be used in the game engines, Unreal and Unity. PBR is physically based rendering (I think). I have only a vague grasp of the particulars of this and the significance. What I can share is that it means that the graphics in games will look even better and even more realistic. There are some other more technical things that make this important but I haven’t read enough to share all that. Let’s just say, it is considered a real game changer. No pun intended.

Keeping in mind the coolness of Substance Painter, I would still really like to try out Mari from The Foundry. I don’t know if it does PBR shaders too. It might. The Foundry seems to put out some pretty impressive tools so it probably does. What has kept me from trying Mari is the price and that it only had a 15 day trial. Thus the reason for checking out Substance Painter. So as I was scanning my Twitter feed last week I saw a mention of a non-commercial version of Mari which I had to look into, and, sure enough. The Foundry have created a non-commercial version of Mari for personal learning use. Nice. This might be the answer for me. I can spend some time learning it and deciding if it’s going to be worth it before I spend a big chunk of money on it. I may give that a shot soon. First, I will spend a bit more time getting comfortable with Substance Painter to give it a really fair evaluation. I already have it installed, and given what it can do, as well as it being very budget friendly it’s a good option. Add to that, Allegorithmic are having a sale until the 22nd, it becomes an even more appealing option. I just don’t want to rush to get it if it turns out I’m not going to even start to get comfortable with it.

Now, on to some actual art for this week.

I made a flower for the scene with the Worm Guy. I started out just Flower_07052016b_sm_wmtrying some things to see how it was going to go.  The first thing I did was to create one petal. When I created the petal the pivot point and center point were at the center of the object, which is normal. I wanted to make a bunch of copies of the petal in a full circle. I can do that using the rotate tool to create my copies but that will create the copies around the pivot point. So I had to move the pivot so that it would be a little away from one of the ends of the petal. Then I was able to create the copies in a nice circle. Cool. I also created the center section and the stem. Next, I need some leaves for the stem.
Flower_07052016a_c_sm_wm

The other thing I spent some time working on was the Studio Sign. I know, it’s been a while since I worked on that. But I was on the phone and that’s always a good time to put dots on paper. I’m letting it sit a few days but I may have finished it. I’ll know after I spend some time looking at it. Sometimes, after a piece sits for a while I find that it needs just a little something else. So we’ll see. Here it is for now.

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And that’s the fun for now. I’m not quite sure what I’ll be getting into this week. I have so much that I can do. The big challenge may be choosing.

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Takin’ a Small Break to Recover – July 5, 2016

Posted on July 5, 2016 by SusanG

I spent most of last week cleaning up and trying to recover from the trip to Florida. I went down to see my niece get married. It was quite an adventure and I returned with a gift from Florida. A nice allergic reaction to something. That, resulted in a short visit to an emergency room for some meds because there was no clinic open at 11:00 pm. It turns out that Prednisone and Benadryl are a really bad combination. Too jittery to sleep and too sleepy to concentrate.

So I did my best to keep busy but I didn’t really get to work on much. I built a few Lego kits. That was fun. I even ordered a set of just bricks to prototype something I want to build. I also put together a shuttle model from Meccano. It’s what I would call an
erector set but the brand on the box is Meccano. That turned out to be a bit of a pain. I think I may stick with Lego bricks.

Once I got past the meds and got some sleep so I could think again, I did a little work on that painting of the guitar head stock.  So I thought I would share some work in progress pictures.

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I even started working on the parts for the scene for the Worm Guy to sit in. I want him to sit on a leaf and I think I want a part of a flower to show. Originally, I was thinking I just needed to modelLeaf_07042016a_c_sm_wm the leaf but as I think more about it, I may need to model more of the plant that the leaf is a part of. I will also need to model the flower. Probably the whole thing. This might get tricky but there are a few things I think I can to do to make it look the way I want and yet not require a ton of really detailed work. I think. I guess we’ll find out. In the mean time, here’s what I got done on the leaf so far. I haven’t added any texture or anything, just some rough modeling.

Oh. Remember I was going to try out one of the programs for painting texture on models. I finally downloaded Substance Painter 2. I think it’s actually 2.1 for anyone keeping score. So, like a lot of people, I don’t always read directions for a program when I first start using it. I didn’t this time either. That didn’t work so well. I couldn’t figure out how to get my model into the program to paint on it. I had to go to the support documentation to figure that one out. It wasn’t really difficult, but certainly not drag and drop. It also took me a little bit to figure out how to move around wormguy_colortest_07042016a_c_sm_wmmy model so I could see what the painting looked like. I tried watching some of the tutorials but I wasn’t really into it. However, I was able to get enough out of them that I could figure out how to export the image/texture that I created and was then able to apply it back to my model in 3DS Max. I used the first version of the Worm Guy to test this out with so there isn’t all the cool detail to the model. I just wanted to play with the paint.

I’ve got the 30 day trial of Substance Painter. At the end I’ll decide if I want to purchase it full out or get the subscription which will get me a couple more things in addition to Substance Painter, or I could decide to try something else. I’m not sure yet. It looks like it will do what I want and need to do, possibly a little better than trying to do it with regular UV’s and Photoshop. But it may take as much work to really master it as it is taking to learn 3DS Max. The tutorials look like they are going to be helpful but so far they seem to get a little more technical with regards to the technology instead of just showing how to use it. Then again, getting the texture and materials right on a model can really make a difference. Perhaps I should expect it to take some work to get good textures for my models.

Well now, isn’t that interesting. I think I might need to do some re-evaluation of my expectations. Stay tuned.

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Back to the Worm Guy – June 28, 2016

Posted on June 28, 2016 by SusanG

Remember when I said I was trying to think of all the parts I wanted for both sides of the
Worm Guy before I split him and then mirrored him? That didn’t work out quite as planned.

I did the part where I got rid of the side that I hadn’t really worked on. Then I made a
mirror copy of the side I did work on. Then, I welded them together. This was a vertex by
vertex process. Once I did that I realized I hadn’t made his top teeth. No big deal. It’s
not like creating a whole mouth full of teeth. I just created the top teeth.

Of course I didn’t make them quite long enough so they were really stubby when I applied a smoothing modifier to them. When I tried to make them longer I found they were going to run into the bottom teeth. So the bottom teeth had to be angled back into the mouth a bit and then the top teeth had to be angled out a bit. Then I could make the top teeth longer and they didn’t look so stubby.

Ok, getting close to needing color or a rig. Oh! Wait. Eye balls. I want the eye to sort of
bulge out so it needs to be a little big and yet needs to basically fit the socket I’ve
created. So I created a sphere of a good size and then sat it in the socket. It fit but not
exactly. I needed to adjust the shape of the socket a bit so that it fit better around the
eyeball. I probably could compensate for that some if I were giving him eye lids but I have
decided not to do that. So adjustments had to be made. And then I needed to do the adjustments on the other side for the other eyeball. Well, shoot.

I didn’t want to try to duplicate the adjustments to the eyesocket. I knew they wouldn’t
look right. I’d end up with a psychotic looking worm. So afer all that work, and welding, I
decided to select one side and delete all the polygons and then do the mirror copy thing
again. No biggie, right?

WormGuy_v2a_06192016c_c_sm_wm

Well, it should have been no biggie. Apparently I didn’t get the selection of the polygons at the teeth right. I ended up with an extra one or two after the mirror. I found it as I was trying to weld things again. So I tried deleting the extras and really made a mess. I broke one of the teeth pretty good. With it all together I had some trouble trying to clean it up. I couldn’t seem to get some of the polygons out of the way so that I could really see what was going on. And since I’d managed to mangle the two teeth in the front, right next to each other, I had to fix both. Hmm.

Here’s some of what I broke.

WormGuy_v2a_06192016a_c_sm_wm WormGuy_v2a_06192016b_c_sm_wm

I figured out that if I deleted the new mirrored side and then just fixed the one side, I
would be able to get to the messed up polygons and I could just mirror over the fix. Then I
didn’t have to do the work twice. So that’s what I did. All better now.

WormGuy_v2a_06192016f_c_sm_wm     WormGuy_v2a_06212016b_c_sm_wmWormGuy_v2a_06212016A_c_sm_wm

As best I can figure, what’s left for the Worm Guy is color, a rig, and then pose. Unless,
of course, I decide he needs something else. I also need to build the scene I’m going to
sit him in. I think I’ve got something that will look really nice and cheery, I just need
to build it. Hopefully it will go smoothly.

WormGuy_v2a_06212016d_c_sm_wm

I am still planning on testing Substance Painter with the Worm Guy for his color. I like
that I can download a free 30 day trial for it. I was all set to do the download and decided that since I was going to spend the weekend in Florida for my niece’s wedding that maybe I would wait until I got back to do that. I don’t want to lose 4 days of my free 30 days. What can I say.

More to come on the Worm Guy, and who knows what else.

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A Lego Distraction – June 26, 2016

Posted on June 26, 2016 by SusanG

I like putting things together. I like getting kits and putting them together to build things. It’s part of what I like about 3D modeling in the computer. It’s a similar concept for me. As much as I like building things in the computer, sometimes I like to put things together in the physical world.

Lately that’s taken the form of Lego kits. It started with the ‘Mixels’, and then a car and
a motorcycle. Just the small kits. More recently I’ve progressed to some of the Marvel
Universe kits like the Hulk Buster and the Crossbones fight.

For my Birthday I bought the Wall-E kit. This was the biggest kit I’d bought, over 650
pieces. Just this last week I finally decided to start on it. I thought I was doing great.
Working along step by step, until, I got to step 50 something and found that I put a piece
in wrong. I put the piece in wrong back at step 20 something. Grrr.

Fortunately I didn’t have to take everything completely apart all the way back to that
step. I was able to limit what had to be deconstructed so that I could go back and turn
this piece one quarter turn to fix it. And, then put it all back and move forward.

It could have been much worse. There are over 170 steps in this build, at least it happened
early and I found it before things got too far along. After that it really started coming
together. It gets pretty addictive seeing it start to fit together and look like the
expected end result.

It’s also cool when you are building a segement that you aren’t really sure what it’s going
to be and then you get done and suddenly you recognize it. That happened with the first eye for Wall-E. I was building it and got to the last bits and realized it was his eye and I
thought that was so cool. Little delights.

I didn’t think to take pictures of the build until I was almost done but here are some
picture at the end of the build as I added his eyes and arms.

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And also a final shot.

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This was a lot of fun to build. There are a few more kits that I have seen that I really
would like to build. I think they would be a lot of fun. Some are really big so they may
take a bit longer.

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Putting Myself Out There – June 21, 2016

Posted on June 21, 2016 by SusanG

I generally hate to have my picture taken. I know I’m not the only one. For me, most of the time there is something about the way I look that I just don’t like. My eyes are too squinty or my teeth too small or my gums show too much or my hair decided not to cooperate. Any number of things. I hate to have my picture taken. So, you can imagine how bad I cringe and how quickly I change the subject whenever someone suggests I put my picture on my website or blog.

I would much rather post a picture of the Worm Guy, WormGuy_v2a_06142016b_c_sm_wm

or a nice Work In Progress picture of my Gibson guitar head stock painting,20160619_201503_c_sm_wm

or even my build of the Lego Wall-E kit. 20160619_213146_c_sm

All of that is so much more preferable to me than to post a picture of myself.

However, I have finally been convinced to do just that. Post a picture of myself.

After working on all those other projects this week I crawled through my files and found aMe_Chinese_sm picture of myself to share with you.

It’s not terribly recent. But it’s not too old, maybe two years. I was learning Chinese Calligraphy. My instructor took this. He had just taught me to write my name and I was concentrating very hard. What I found then and still find today, the most amazing part about Chinese Calligraphy is how precise the whole process is. There is a specific way to hold the brush, and you are supposed to sit a certain way and hold the paper down with the other hand a particular way. And the strokes are supposed to be done in a specific order for each character. And what was really amazing to me was that he could tell if I hadn’t done the strokes in the correct order. Enjoy the picture.

I suppose, now, it might be nice if I post the picture in a more permanent and maybe even more prominent spot on the site. I’ll work on that. I should be able to take care of that soon. That is provided it doesn’t send me off down the path of once again looking for a different theme. Which is something I keep contemplating so it could happen. I’ll try not to get too side-tracked before I get it posted.  Especially since I also have updates on some of the other projects.

I have news of the Worm Guy, though, not a lot. And there was the adventure of putting together the Lego Wall-E kit. That was fun. There’s not much to tell about the painting. Really, how much can you tell about putting dots on paper, or in this case, canvas board. And I’m starting to get excited about another couple of projects which I think I’m going to keep under my hat for a bit longer. Happy Summer!

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