Next Project! – Weekly Update May 10, 2016

Posted on May 10, 2016 by SusanG

Yep, on to the next project. The Birthday Card for 2016 is complete and posted so now it’s time to start something else. I’ve got a few ideas but nothing has started begging me to make it so it is more difficult to choose. If one idea were just screaming to be made it would be really easy. Still, I’ve decided. Well, sort of. I’ve more or less chosen by default.

Not always the best way to choose something, by default, but it is a way. I really want to do something for Halloween. I like the holiday and I want to do some fun stuff for it. I figure I can start by making a card. Now, what to put on the card. I have a traditional type of idea20160508_175704_c_sm_wm as well as something a little less conventional. And I have a few things in between. I’m having trouble deciding which way to go. One of the ideas involves creating a skull. I’ve only made an attempt at this once. It was in the ZBrush class I took last year at the ZBrush Summit. Another idea involves a Jack’o Lantern. I’ve done that before but it was in ZBrush and for this I’m using 3DS Max. So that will be different. Hoping to find some inspiration and maybe nail down the idea, I did a bit of sketching last week. I’m not sure they helped me make a decision, but here they are.
20160508_175744_c_sm_wm Speaking of ZBrush and the ZBrush Summit. Pixologic have announced the dates for this year’s ZBrush Summit. It is to be the weekend of September 30th to October 2nd. You can get info over on the Pixologic site. One cool thing I saw when I was looking at the site,
was that in one of the promotional pictures they are using from the past summits, you can see me. As silly as it sounds, I was excited. I don’t expect to be attending in person this year. I will, however, be attending remotely. They did an awesome job with that the first year, and I caught a little that way last year, even though I was there in person. So if you can’t get there in person, sign up on the site so you get the updates and the information so you can watch it remotely.

Back to projects. Now you have a glimpse of one of the ideas for the Halloween card that I might be playing with. I have a few more ideas so this is just a start. Because I don’t have a set idea yet and I could come up with another one or two ideas before I get everything finalized it makes it a little difficult to figure out where to start. I want and need to start modeling something. Do I start with a skull or a jack’o lantern or something else? I finally decided to just start with a jack’o lantern. It’s versatile and I need it for a couple of the card ideas so it wouldn’t be a waste. Jack’o Lantern it is.

The thing about a jack’o lantern is that it is deceptively easy. You start with a sphere and cut some holes in it. Of course, you know it’s not that easy. Especially if you want to put a light inside and have it cast light and shadows properly. I put a lot of thought into how I wanted to handle this. If I just cut holes in the sphere and then render it, what happens is that the inside of the sphere is transparent when looking out, so you look through the holes into nothing. A bit like one way glass. So the problem becomes how to keep that from happening. I thought about trying to make the polygons double-sided but I want some thickness so it looks like a pumpkin that has been carved. If I just make the polygons double-sided then I don’t have thickness and I don’t know if I can apply one material to the outside and another to the inside.

My solution was to duplicate the pumpkin and then scale down the duplicate so it fitsJackoLantern2016_05082016b_c_sm_wm inside. Then I wanted to try to flip the normals on the inside pumpkin so that if you are inside the smaller pumpkin, you can no longer see out and you can see whatever material is assigned to it. I tested this first just to make sure it was going to work. Here’s a shot of that test. You can see I created the lid and did something similar. You can also see, in the pumpkin, that space between the big one and the smaller one, you can see where you can see though the other side of the big pumpkin. This is a good example of the issue I’m trying to resolve. It also demonstrates one of the next challenges I needed to address.

I need thickness, I also need to bridge that gap between the two pumpkins. I can do that by attaching one pumpkin to the other and then creating the faces to go between the two. Even though I want the inside and those edges to be attached to the outside pumpkin I want them to be separate elements so it’s easier to apply different materials to the inside and the outside. My solution to this was to attach the inside to the outside and then create the faces. As I did this, I left the previous faces I created selected so when I was finished I had all the new faces selected. I was then able to detach them from the two pumpkins to make them separate elements. Once I had all the filler edges created and detached, then I detached the inside pumpkin from the outside. Then I attached the new elements to the inside pumpkin and also welded the points so that I ended up with the inside pumpkin with these edges or lips. All one element. So then when I attached the outside pumpkin back to the inside pumpkin I had two elements that I could apply different materials to.

JackoLantern2016_05082016g_c_sm_wm

I sort of jumped over creating the face of the jack’o lantern. I tend to fall back on the cliche version with the triangle eyes and nose and the goofy grin. I am trying to do something a little more interesting. To achieve that I had to do a lot of cutting to create the edges and shapes I wanted so I could cut out the parts that are to be openings. That was a little JackoLantern2016_05082016h_c_sm_wmfrustrating to do. Things don’t smooth quite as I would like and to get that may take a lot of manual manipulation. But I’ve got something that is a little interesting for now. I did the cut outs before I created the inside pumpkin, that way I didn’t have to try to duplicate the same holes. Then I duplicated it and scaled it down to fit inside. From there I created the filler edges. To test it all I applied some really basic standard materials of different colors to the inside and the outside. It’s coming along. I need to make the stem for the top. And I may even make a candle to go inside to make the light source more realistic.

I did a little prep work for the Sticks animation. I checked the pivot points for the letters and made sure they were all at the same point in relation to each letter. And I made note of the locations of the letters along the Z and Y axis so I can get things back in place at the end. It’s not work that you can really take renders or screenshots of. Well, maybe I could but they wouldn’t be very interesting.

In the time since I started the jack’o lantern I’ve seen a font on a design van that is trying to work it’s way into the scene and it could sway the direction of the Halloween card towards a little more ghoul-ly and slightly macabre. With that possibility, I might need to let that one simmer a little longer. It could be worth it to get into the Sticks animation project more this week while the Halloween idea stews a little more. Though I could go back to the jack’o lantern and finish up the stem.  Whichever I do, I’ve at least got things to work on. I suggest checking back for the next update to find out how it’s going and what is getting worked on.

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Minor Disruption – Weekly Update May 3, 2016

Posted on May 3, 2016 by SusanG

Last week was vacation from the day job. Or as my co-worker called it ‘my stay-cation’. I had no plans to go anywhere just time off so I could work on the Birthday Card, sleep in a bit and get a few things taken care of, like having the car serviced. I was also expecting family members to arrive from the Pacific Northwest. Kind of a full week for a vacation without travel. I had it all worked out though and managed to get the Birthday Card done but not much else.

I worked pretty intently the first couple of days of the week to finish up the rigging on the robot hands and get the weight painting completed. I wanted to show that I really did rig them for animating so I created a short video, not even 2 seconds long, of the hands moving from one pose to another and put it up on YouTube. Don’t blink when you watch it.

After that little diversion, I imported the hands into the scene with the balloons. I scaled them to a size that looked right and then positioned them. I was able to get them both in roughly the correct places just using the global control to position them just behind the strings from the balloons. It wasn’t perfect just a good start. Then I had to move each, one at a time, as well as rotate them so they would look right when I closed them up to hold the strings. Once I had them in about the right place and at the right angle, that’s when I started posing them. As I was posing the hands to hold the strings, I found that the strings weren’t quite long enough. Instead of moving the hands up I just lengthened and adjusted the strings to fit down into the hands better. In some cases I also had to make adjustments to the angle of the string to make it look more natural.

When I tested some of the rigging controls I was a little concerned that my angle of the thumb controls might be really off, but I decided not to try to correct it. When I got to posing the thumb it finally clicked with me that it was the space I was trying to rotate in that was more the issue than the angle of the rig control. Normally I work all my translations (moving an object), rotations and scaling in what is called World view. So all those actions happen in relation to the scene. What I needed to do for the thumb was to rotate it in either gimbel or local view. With local view that means that it is rotating in relation to the control that I have selected, this includes it’s angle. As an example, if I had two boxes one box that I rotated 30 degrees and then froze that so that became it’s default position. If I select it to rotate it in world view, it would look a bit like it was tumbling. The other box, if I left it as I had created it and decided to rotate it in world view, it would look more like it was spinning. If I want to rotate that first box so that it looks more like it is spinning then I have to choose the local view to rotate in because then the gizmo for rotating will have the same orientation as the box.

I know it’s confusing. I usually forget to use the local view for rotating or even scaling. When it came to posing the thumb, especially, it was important to use local view for the rotation. This allowed me to get a smoother and more natural looking pose of the thumb. I didn’t have too much trouble with rolling the fingers down and in to complete the fist look. I just had to do it finger by finger and joint by joint. Then I found that the strings were breaking the surface of the hands. They looked like they were going right through the hand. So I had to adjust the placement and angle of some of the strings again. I was going to have the hands at the same height but it didn’t really look right, I think it looks more interesting with them just a little off from each other. So here’s a shot of the final card in case you didn’t see the announcement post. You can see it on my Zazzle store. I have a link to the store on the right.

CardBdayTake2_2016v2_04262016c_Final_small_wm

And as an additional little treat, here are a couple of stills of the hands from the animation I posted to YouTube.
Robot_Hand_Style1_04262016a_c_sm_wm  Robot_Hand_Style1_04262016b_c_sm_wm

That was all I got worked on this week. By the time I got that completed and posted and announced everywhere, I had house guests coming. This was my minor disruption. My house guests are family members that have decided that the Pacific Northwest is not for
them so they are moving back east. Most of the family is either in the Midwest or in the east, primarily southeast. They were kind of off on their own lonesome out there and after a health issue last year as well as not really enjoying the area they decided that maybe being closer than a 9 hour plane ride would be a good idea. They had been in Florida before but really wanted some place different so since I’m in the Carolinas and I have a sibling that flies through here a lot, they figured it would be a good place to shoot for. No matter how much we love and enjoy our family and guests, they do tend to bring a minor disruption to our routine and that has been the case for me. As a result I don’t have much else to get to share this week. I got the card done and posted and that’s been it.

I am optimistic that I will get to work on something this week. I’m a little between working on the Sticks animation and starting on the Halloween Card. Yes, Halloween. I may try to work on both. At least get started on the card and start to get Sticks set up. That would be cool. And since it is May, I should probably start thinking about the Holiday/Christmas Card for this year. I’m thinking of using the sleigh I was working on last summer. I could put Sticks in a Santa hat handing out presents, or something like that. What do you think? Maybe? Maybe not? I’ll figure something out. I have bits and pieces of ideas floating around in my head that might manage to put themselves together. Check back to find out what happens next.

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Birthday Card 2016 Now Available

Posted on April 27, 2016 by SusanG

Ok everyone, the Birthday card that you’ve been reading about is finally complete and ready for you. You can check it out at: Happy Birthday Balloons Birthday Card or browse my Zazzle Store just use the link at the right.

For now here’s a look at the finished design.

CardBdayTake2_2016v2_04262016c_Final_small

 

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I Think I’m Going to Make It – Weekly Update April 26, 2016

Posted on April 26, 2016 by SusanG

I think I’m going to have the Birthday Card done by the end of the month, which turns out to be the end of the week. I was a little slow getting started on the robot hands this week but once I finally got focused, it went pretty quick. Mostly. I’m not quite done with the hands but close enough that I can see the end of this project. And I learned something.

I got to thinking about the material I had selected for the hands. I started thinking that they would really overwhelm the look of the balloons. And someone might think they looked a bit like C-3PO. I didn’t want that. So I spent a bit of time finding a better
material combination. I ended up with a stainless steel and titanium combination. It works for me. I really like the subtle difference between the two materials. It helps to add a little definition to the different parts.

Robot_Hand_Style1_04212016b_c_sm_wm Robot_Hand_Style1_04212016c_c_sm_wm

I had to go back and re-watch part of the rigging tutorial. Just for the hands. Oh, and I think last week I said it used 3 fingers and a thumb. I was wrong, it uses 2 fingers and a thumb. So, I had much more work to do to set up the bones for each hand as Robot_Hand_Style1_04212016d_c_sm_wm
compared to the tutorial. Fortunately I didn’t have to follow along step by step this time. I left off any arm or wrist bones since I really don’t need that functionality for this. I did add a global control so that I could link everything back to it to make moving and scaling things easier. I tested that just with the bones. I’ll want to test that again once everything is skinned.

When I set up the controls I did add a wrist control for each hand, even though I didn’t add a wrist bone. I figured it would make it easier to use that to rotate a hand up or over or whatever instead of trying to do it from the hand bone.

Robot_Hand_Style1_04242016c_sm_wm

As you can see there are a fair number of controls for the fingers. The most challenging part with this setup is remembering what to link to what. Because it uses a double joint Robot_Hand_Style1_04242016d_sm_wmsystem, which I think works really nicely for what I’m doing, the controls don’t link just to the one bone they are aligned to. The orientation constraint links from the bone to the control. Then there is some position constraint linking to the bone or control above it. Then to control the trailing bones wire parameters are used to get that added bend. It will take some time before that becomes second nature to me. Here’s a look at the hierarchy of the left hand bones and controls.

Ok. So I did procrastinate a lot when it came to starting the rig. Even though creating the bones turned out to be really fast and easy. Then I delayed again with setting up the controls. It’s really silly that I did that because once I got going, it went pretty quick too. At that point I was pretty well into getting this done so I reviewed the skinning step. I wasn’t entirely sure it was as easy as I thought it was. Sure enough, it was. However, I had one little question. When I did Sticks, he was all one piece so I just followed along with the tutorial. In this case I have two separate objects, the left hand and the right hand. So I had to figure out if I was going to be able to do each as it’s own entity. Turns out, it is sort of covered in the tutorial. That has the eyebrows as separate entities so they are skinned separate from the rest of the character though their rig is connected to the global control. I didn’t remember this because Sticks has no facial features so I didn’t pay attention to that the first time through.

Since I was going to skin each hand as a separate entity and they both have so many bones, I got clever and set up two selection sets, one for the bones for each hand. This was really easy since, as you can see in the picture of the hierarchy, I used a good naming convention. So I searched on “Bn_L” and was able to select all the left hand bones. Then I added them to a selection set for the left hand. For the right hand I searched on “Bn_R” and was able to create a selection set for the right hand. This made things a lot easier for skinning. I applied the skin modifier and when I went to add the bones I pulled up the
appropriate selection set and clicked the select button and I was all set.

The last step in the rigging for the hands is setting up the bone weights. This is the most fiddly part. I did like the tutorial shows, and setup a pose using key frames so I had an animation that I could scrub through. Once I got the hang of what I wanted to do, and saw that it worked, it was fairly easy to get the weighting for the fingers, and part of the thumb. Unfortunately the hand and the first thumb joint weren’t so easy. These were the particularly fiddly bits. I spent the most time on these parts.

So far I’ve got the right hand rigged and skinned but not weighted. I have the left hand rigged, skinned and weighted. I even rendered a couple of frames so you can have a look.

Robot_Hand_Style1_04252016a_c_sm_wmRobot_Hand_Style1_04252016b_c_sm_wm

And here’s where I learned something. I discovered that I don’t really have the angle of the thumb quite right. I don’t have the base model at the correct angle and as a result, I didn’t get the bones at quite the right angle. It means my controls are a little off so the thumb doesn’t behave quite as you would expect. Fortunately, it’s not a big problem and I can still work with it as it is. However, it is something I will want to remember for future rigs.

What’s left is to set the weights on the right hand and then get both hands into the Birthday Card scene and pose them. I think I can have all of that done and a final render completed by the end of the week. I’m on vacation from the day job this week so that
helps. And I don’t have a lot of things planned to get done so I don’t have much in the way of excuses at this point. Look for an announcement when I post it on the store. And then check back next week to find out what’s next.

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Not Very Effective — Weekly Update April 19, 2016

Posted on April 19, 2016 by SusanG

So it’s allergy season here. Honestly with the way the weather has been messed up I think it’s been allergy season here since Christmas. I feel like I’ve taken so much allergy medication that maybe I should buy stock in the company. It can be a little
frustrating to need to take something so often and after a while I wonder if maybe I’m taking it out of habit. So this past week, I tried to cut back. I’m one of those people that the stuff that works best for me, and causes me the least amount of other side effects is the stuff that puts me to sleep. I figured if I could cut back and not take it as often I might be more alert and get more done. As it turns out, I have the choice of fighting off the sleepiness from the medication or the tiredness caused by the allergies. So, yeah, not taking the sleepy allergy medication so I could get more done, not a very effective strategy.

I guess, if I had to have a week that lost productivity, better it be this past week instead of next week when I’m on vacation from the day job. I’m hoping to have larger chunks of time to work on something, anything, and make big progress.

I was having an email conversation with a friend today with regards to creating the balloon letters and the math of it. My friend said that the balloon letters were basically cylinders and that I should be able to make the base shapes and then merge them together. This isn’t wrong. It’s true. It could work, sort of. The way I was reading and understanding what my friend was saying, didn’t seem like it would work. And the way I was understanding it, I don’t think it would. However, manipulated slightly differently, it might. Or at least it would be closer to working. That aside. As I was trying to explain the caveats to what my
friend was suggesting, I came to realize that I might need to make a small demo video of some step or steps of modeling something. I’ve got to figure out how to do that so don’t expect it any time soon. It also made me aware that I might need to put together
some sort of primer for reference. Again, probably not too soon. Or maybe start it and keep it as a work in progress until I can get the whole thing really polished. One more item for the list.

Now on to what I did manage to get done over the week.

I finished modeling the Robot Hand. It needed another joint or knuckle for the fingers andRobot_Hand_Style1_04162016a_c_wm the tips of the fingers. Not too difficult. For the most part I’m working with base shapes that have a small amount of transformations applied. I used the copy for the last set of knuckles and then scaled them to fit the end better. Then I copied one set of bone cylinder things and added them on top. I spaced everything and did a little bit of scaling. Probably the most difficult, and it wasn’t very difficult, was getting the tips rounded. The copy I made had the top concaved to cradle the sphere being used for the knuckle. I needed that top to be convex and rounded. I don’t have a lot of edge loops there so I could do the whole thing manually and it worked out a little easier than using the soft select for this. I selected one edge loop at a time and transformed it into it’s place and then for the very center I just selected the vertex and moved it. I did a little more adjusting. Again, not too many edge loops, so it wasn’t an arduous task.

Robot_Hand_Style1_04162016d_c_sm_wm

I did a little more adjusting before I attached all the parts. I tightened up the bone bits that the knuckles sit in so that you see a little less of the knuckle. I also adjusted some of the sizing a little. The main hand part got some refining. I moved some edge loops a little to help soften the corners some. Not too much, just a bit. With that done I selected the hand part and attached the knuckles and the finger bone parts working from hand to tip. I just attached. I didn’t join or weld any of it. I want to try to keep some of the mechanical with the bones looking like they are sliding over the the knuckle spheres.

I decided to work on the materials for the Robot Hand next. I want it to look mechanical and a good way to do that is to use a metal material. I tried using a brushed metal but it was so flat that an aluminum or stainless steel looked like a flat dull grey. Even a brass or copper didn’t really come off. So I adjusted and chose a semi-polished finish. That helped mostly. I probably won’t know for sure until I get the hand in a scene with something other than the default lighting. Polished metal needs light and other things to reflect for it to be most effective. Right now things look a little dark.

Robot_Hand_Style1_04162016f_c_sm_wm     Robot_Hand_Style1_04162016h_c_sm_wm

Ok. Almost there. Two more small things before I start creating bones for rigging. I want the hand in a position as if it has a body attached and it was standing in a T-pose. So I rotated around the x axis and then around the y axis to get them in the right position. The last thing. I need a second Robot Hand. To get that I used the Mirror Tool and made sure to make a copy while mirroring in the x axis. Now I have two Robot Hands that need bones and rigging.

Robot_Hand_Style1_04172016a_c_sm_wm Robot_Hand_Style1_04172016b_c_sm_wm

The letter balloons are modeled, they all have strings, I have two Robot Hands, and nothing to do that I could use to as an excuse to keep from starting the process of creating the bones and setting up the rig. Guess that’s what I’ll be getting started on next.

The hand rigging will be a little different than with Sticks. Even accounting for the difference in the hand shape and the missing body for the hands. With Sticks, though you can’t see it because of his hand shape, he does have 3 fingers as well as a thumb. That’s what the tutorial used and it worked ok for Sticks even with his block hands. This hand has 4 fingers and the pinky finger isn’t going to need quite the flexibility as it would with a more organic hand. It doesn’t really need the ability to roll inward. I don’t want it to look too “alive”. I don’t know if I will leave that ability off or just not use it in the posing process.

As you can see, as close as I am to being able to set up a final render for the card, I still have work to do. I think I will stay on the allergy medication this week. Even with having to fight through the sleepies I have a feeling I’ll get more done. At least I hope so. Check back next week to find out how this experiment works out.

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