An ‘H’ An ‘A’ and Other Stuff – Weekly Update March 1, 2016

Posted on March 1, 2016 by SusanG

When I decided on this Birthday card project I thought it would go a fairly quick. Since I’ve only just finished the ‘H’, I’m thinking that’s not going to be the case.

I finally got the ‘H’ all nice and poofy balloon looking over the weekend. It took a lot of time to get it just right. I thought I had it full looking and then from one angle or another I could see the legs looking flat instead of rounded. So I kept going in and tweaking vertices and edges to get them in just the right place to create a curved surface look instead of a flattened surface. I finally got it looking enough like I want to call it good and move on. I will probably go back and do some more fine tuning when I add the balloon tail. That bit where you tie off the balloon after blowing it up so the air doesn’t come back out, the tail, or knot.

BDayCard2016_02212016e_c_sm_wm   BDayCard2016_02212016f_c_sm_wm

That’s something I haven’t really touched on. How do I want to show the balloon-ness with the tail at the end. And how do I show the string attaching to the balloons. This is related to that question of whether to make them mylar style balloons or latex style rubber balloons. I’m still working on that. Though I appear to be leaning towards the latex style. But my plan is to get all the letters balloon-ified then go back and add the the tail later. I’m sort of hoping to make one tail and then make adjustments to it per letter as I attach it.

After finishing, at least for now, the ‘H’, I moved on to the ‘A’. This didn’t seem to take as long. I’m not sure if it’s because I started a little more efficiently or I just don’t have it quite there yet. I have a feeling it may be a bit of both. It is certainly not as poofed out as the ‘H’. It looks more streamlined, or like it was made from the long balloons like are used for the
balloon animals. I did start with the edges I had and didn’t add extras at the beginning. So fewer edges mean fewer vertices to manipulate. Though I do tink I might need a few more edge loops. At least two on each leg, one above and one below the bar. If I do that I will definitely need or want to go in and exaggerate the poofiness more. Its a tough call since it looks pretty good as it is.

BDayCard2016_02282016e_c_sm_wm    BDayCard2016_02282016g_c_sm_wm

I probably give the impression that I spent a really large amount of time each day working on the ‘H’ and the ‘A’. Unfortunately, I got into a sleep deficit during the week that because of several mundane tasks and chores I just couldn’t recover from. Which means I had more non-productive days than I care for. This is important because during the week I work on my projects in much smaller time chunks than on the weekend. And that can really have an impact on how long it takes me to finish a project.

I did figure out how to navigate in the 3DS Max view port while using the grip pen for my Intuos tablet. Of course if you’ve been using a Wacom tablet for a while you probably already know what I did or needed to do to fix this. And when I ran into the problem
I sort of maybe remembered what I needed to do but I didn’t think to try it until this weekend. I went into the the utility for the tablet settings and changed the setting for the button on the pen. It was set to either right-click or double-click and I changed it to middle mouse. And it worked. Yay! I would say it worked like a champ except it really didn’t. It worked fine, just not optimally. I made the top button the middle mouse and I find it a bit awkward for regular use. My plan is, for the Cintiq I will set the bottom pen button to the middle mouse. I think it will feel more natural.

I’m starting to get a little excited about possibly using the Cintiq for 3DS Max. I think I said I wasn’t so sure about it because my regular monitors are 27 inches and my Cintiq is 22 inches. That was before I ordered the arm mount for my desk. I’m a little height challenged and I’ve had some trouble getting comfortable with the Cintiq with my desk and chair combination. I’ve tried some different configurations, none of which have worked very well. I saw a picture of some animator’s or other computer artist’s desk
with their Cintiq mounted to their desk by this swing arm. So I started looking for one. I found it and have had it book marked for months but I hadn’t purchased it. Until this last weekend. I finally ordered it and will have it early this week.

I’m very excited at the prospect of being hunched over my Cintiq like it’s a sketchbook or drawing table and tweaking edges and vertices for hours on end. This could get dangerous. So check back next week to find out what happens with the arm mount and if I manage to pull my eyes away from my balloons long enough to go see Zootopia or if my irises become pixelated. If they aren’t already.

Post Script: While preparing the images for this post I discovered that there is much more work I need to do on both the ‘H’ and the ‘A’. Guess what I will be doing this week. Maybe I’ll get to start on the ‘P’ soon.

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Sometimes I Wonder…But I Think It’s Going to Work – Weekly Update February 23, 2016

Posted on February 23, 2016 by SusanG

Sometimes I get started on a project and part way through it I wonder if I should question my sanity. If I’m lucky, I’m half way through the project or even further before this thought hits me. And if I’m not so lucky, it hits me early in the project. This can be a good thing, if I need to re-assess and try something different. I don’t think that’s the case with this birthday card project.

BDayCard2016_02162016a_sm_wm

I started working on the second round of refining the letters, into their more balloon like letter shapes. That round seemed to go fairly quick. And you can see here how the top half of the letters look compared to the bottom. Not really a lot of difference.  This is probably why it seemed to go fast.

Even getting the rest of it completed to the same level was fairly easy, I had it done in just a few days of working on it part-time. This should have been my first clue that I wasn’t really being aggressive enough with inflating the letters into puffy balloons. But at least everything is at the same level here. You can see how they all look. But when I apply the turbosmooth modifier, you can really tell that they’re not even close to looking like balloons.

BDayCard2016_02192016a_sm_wmBDayCard2016_02192016b_sm_wm Once all the letters were at the same level of refinement again it came down to deciding whether I continue to make small incremental adjustments to all the letters or if I go for the end result, or really close to the end result. The difference between the two is where I spend the time. I can either spend small amounts of time on each letter but have to touch them several times, over and over until it looks the way I want or I can spend a bunch of time on a letter to get it to look like I want and then spend a bunch of time on the next letter to get it to look like it belongs. This is where I started wondering if this was really the best idea, creating the letters from scratch instead of using a font and then enhancing it. But as I thought about what I would have to do to even with a font to get the letters nice and round and puffy, I realized it wasn’t going to make it any easier. It could make it more difficult depending on how 3DS Max were to build the faces. So…I decided I might as well go for it and make my balloon letters really look like balloons. I got started. But as you can see, even smoothed, it wasn’t enough.

BDayCard2016_02192016c_c_sm_wm      BDayCard2016_02192016d_c_sm_wm

I had to get even more dramatic. I selected the center faces on the side and transformed them so they were pulled out really far, and then I deselected the top and bottom faces and then did it again until I got to just the few in the center. Then I selected the edges that were along side the panel of faces that had been inflated and did the same thing. To make it a little easier I took the edges on both sides of the panel and adjusted them at the same time so I had some consistency. And I did it the same way I did the panel, deselecting the top and bottom sets until I got to the center set. Finally, I was starting to get something more like I wanted. It even looks right when smoothed. And from another angle.

BDayCard2016_02192016f_c_sm_wm     BDayCard2016_02192016g_c_sm_wm BDayCard2016_02192016i_c_sm_wmThat wasn’t quite enough though, because I really want things to look like the angles are creating choke points. Sort of like taking one of those animal balloons and twisting it or putting a rubber band around it. So the bar in the middle of the ‘H’ needs to puff out and look like it’s also being squished into the legs. I think this is going to work.

BDayCard2016_02202016d_c_sm_wm    BDayCard2016_02202016c_c_sm_wm

It turns out that getting it just right is a very time consuming process. It takes a lot of manipulating first faces and then edges and then vertices. And then doing it again. It means a lot of mousing and a lot of clicking. After last week’s episode with the wrist and arm pain, this could be a bit of a problem. With that much fine control needed I risk more of that pain. So I hooked up the Wacom Intuos to see if that would help but I couldn’t figure out how to move around in the view port with the pen, other than the zoom. I had the same trouble with the Cintiq. I could use the mouse on the Intuos, but that would defeat the purpose. I have a few other keyboards and mice hanging around and decided to try the wireless one on the other pc. It helped some. The mouse is smaller, but that wasn’t a perfect idea either. Too small a mouse is just as big an issue as too large a mouse. I do have one mouse that fits my hand really, really well. I have two of them actually. The Logitech M705. It’s just the right size. I decided that I would use a wired keyboard and that wireless mouse, and get one more of the M705 mice for back up. When I went to purchase the backup mouse, I found that Logitech also makes a 700 series wireless keyboard and mouse combo and wouldn’t you know, the mouse is the M705. So now I’m mousing with a properly fitting mouse and a wireless keyboard with a nice soft wrist support. I think this is going to work out as soon as I get used to how touchy the mouse is in 3DS Max.

Now that I’m comfortable again. I will just need to remember to get up and move once in a while, eat, sleep, all those little things. Check back again to find out how well things are progressing and if I’ve gone gaga from staring at the computer screen and manipulating vertices for too long.

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Working On Stuff – Weekly Update February 16, 2016

Posted on February 16, 2016 by SusanG

After spending so much time last week and weekend working on Sticks and getting him fixed up I woke up Monday with some lovely pain in my hand and forearm. A rather annoying occurance. I sometimes spend a bit too much time mousing on the computer too intently. The pay off for this, besides the progress on whatever I’m working on, is a bit of what is probably some carpel tunnel. Or at least repetitive motion issues. There are all sorts of things that can help but the first issue is getting the pain to go away. Which keeps me from doing things I want to do. For me this time, it was mid to late week before I got some descent relief. At which point I set about making it worse again.

I started the next project. I believe I have mentioned that I feel it is time to get another card prepared and posted. So that’s what I started on. I’ve decided on a Birthday card. It took a bit to come up with how I want to do it. Good thing I had that thinking time while my hand and arm were resting. At this point I’ve decided to go with some balloons saying Happy Birthday and I was thinking of having, just at the bottom, Sticks’ hand holding the strings to them. Then some one reminded me of an idea I had worked on for them a few years ago, so now I’m reconsidering if I want to use Sticks’ hand or another one.

I want the balloons to be interesting and really balloon like. Instead of using a font and creating letters that I then have to edit and manipulate to have more personality, I decided to make the letters myself from base primitives. In this case I started with a cube for all the letters. Here’s a look at what some of them looked like just roughed in. As you can see at this stage there is a lot of work to do on some of the letters.

BDayCard2016_02132016a_c_sm_wm

From this point the first step was to make the shapes look like the letters they are meant to be. This involved some addition of edge loops and some edge and point manipulation to get things in a better shape and position. In some cases I also had to extrude faces to then match them up to another leg or side of the letter. I would select the faces, extrude them just enough, then I would delete the faces I had selected as well as the faces they would be meeting up with. With no faces, I chose the edges that made up the outline of the faces I had deleted. I used this to move the edges closer to the side I wanted to connect them too and when I got them close enough I switched to the point selection mode and welded the appropriate points. Now no holes and a fully connected  letter. Some good examples of letters that were done this way are the ‘A’, ‘P’, and ‘B’. I also had to do this for the ‘R’ and the ‘D’.

BDayCard2016_02132016c_c_sm_wm

The inside cutouts on some of the letters have been a little tricky. Since I started out with a cube and extruded faces to make the shapes, all the cutouts like on the ‘B’ or ‘P’ are mostly square. Ultimately that’s not what I’m going to want. But I’ve got to start somewhere. So square insides it is. I will be fixing this as I continue to BDayCard2016_02142016b_c_sm_wmrefine the shapes.

I have managed to complete a first pass on all the letters so they all look like the letters they are meant to be.

You might be wondering why it doesn’t exactly spell out Happy Birthday yet. I’m trying to work smart. Instead of creating every single letter and then trying to get both ‘P’s or both ‘A’s to look exactly a like, or at least really close, I am creating one of each letter I need and then, once they are complete, or close to, I will copy any letters that I need to finish things out. Remember this is the first pass. I still have more refining to do.

It looks like it’s going to take at least two more passes maybe three to get things really just right. For the second pass I’ve started trying to refine the letters more and I was thinking I BDayCard2016_02152016b_c_sm_wmwas plumbing them out to make them a bit more poofy and balloon like. But when I added a Turbosmooth modifier to the shapes, they really don’t have the volume I want. You can see the difference of the ‘H’ and ‘A’ here as compared to the ‘P’. So I’ll get the rest of the letters to the same level of refinement and then do another round, probably adding more edge loops so I can smooth out some areas and hopefully get things even fuller. I’m still trying to decide if I want them to be mylar style balloons like you get at the grocery store or closer to regular type balloons that just come in the long shapes or the round shapes, not usually in letter or special shapes.

That’s where I’m at this week. No, I didn’t work on Sticks so no new pictures or animations of him for now. I won’t be forgetting him. Really, he’s got work I need him to do. I’ll be getting back to him soon though. And I’ll be getting this card farther along. Yes, even in spite of the pain from too much mousing. I find it very hard to stop and rest for very long. So even though it would be better for me to take a good long break of a week or more, I probably won’t. I will continue to work on things in small chunks and also work on ways to make things more comfortable, and hopefully alleviate the strain that causes the pain. It will take some experimenting. But I have several ideas that I will try first and then a few more that I will try later if those don’t help.

In the mean time I will keep clicking away making 3d computer art and animation because that’s what I do. Come back and see what I get up to next.

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I Think I Fixed It – Weekly Updated February 9, 2016

Posted on February 9, 2016 by SusanG

As you might have guessed I spent my time this week working on Sticks, again. I couldn’t leave the wrists as they were and once I latched on to the idea of using the saved weights file, I had to try it.

Loading the weights file worked as expected, except, apparently it was created after I messed up the left wrist. That was a little disappointing. However, it was created before I messed up the right side. So I decided to clean up the right side weighting for all of Sticks and then try mirroring the settings from right to left. This process has yet to work well for me. I couldn’t really get the mirror to work the first time I tried it last week and this time it didn’t seem to take either. At least, not at the wrists. So I kept clicking and managed to copy the settings from the right side to the left side. This mostly made a bigger mess. Mostly. It was a little helpful.

Copying the weight settings from right to left meant that I had copied the setting for the right side bones to left side vertices. This was helpful because I knew which of the left side bones I needed to add. It was also ugly. Really ugly. Since the bones from the right side were set to influence the vertices on the left they caused a lot of severe pulling and skewing. Fortunately, when I set about this test fix, I didn’t use my final file. Or what was my final file. I used an earlier version and saved that as a new file so it was a disaster all to itself. And. It turned out to be fairly easy to fix, if not a little time consuming. I just
selected a vertex and looked at the right side bones and then added the corresponding left side bones. Then I set all the right side bones to 0 and things straightened out pretty quickly.

I continued with the cleanup thinking that I might make this test fix file my new final file. However, at some point I decided I had enough information to just fix the wrists in my final file. Since I had already done the basic fix in the test file fixing my final file was relatively easy and comparatively quick. I made another test animation to show the fix and to put Sticks in a little different pose. It’s still really short so don’t blink.

I got really side tracked with creating the animation. When I made the final pose I ended up with some annoying flipping or snapping with the right hand. The turn of the hand from its starting point is a bit severe and I think that’s what caused it. Well, that, and using Auto Key. From the videos and tutorials I would say this is a case of gimble lock. Which means I managed to break whatever methods of mitigating it that were inherent in the rig or the process I followed didn’t have any gimble lock mitigation on the wrists. While trying to figure out how to fix it with extra key frames, that weren’t working, I remembered that I could use the curve editor to help clean up and smooth out some of the transitions. I’m not sure I elimintated the flipping completely. I was able to tone it down though. I think that may require smaller key frame sections when I try that again.

Of course my next step with Sticks is to get him worked into the art for SusanG Sticks_3d_connected_02072016e_sm_wmProductions. Which, I have started. I imported the stage and scene around Sticks. At which point I found that he was a little to small to fit the scene. I was a little concerned, for a moment, that the scaling fix on the global control might not work. I am very happy to report that my concern was unfounded. It worked great. I was able to scale Sticks up, rotate him and place him where I needed him. I had to do a test pose so I could see how he looks.

I played around with fitting Sticks into the scene as it was laid out initially and it wasn’t working out. The text was too long to fit nicely in the view and be able to see Sticks. I rearranged the scene a little and moved Sticks over which helped a lot. I also toned down the background and the floor texture to take some busy-ness out of the scene. I’m still working on the background and floor coloring and deciding if I need special lighting, or even a camera view. Here’s where I’m at with it for the moment.

Sticks_3d_connected_02072016n_c_sm_wm

I’m excited to do more with Sticks and give him some companions. I have several companion characters in mind. And I think I might need to start prepping some media/advertising type art. I have at least two ideas for that already. First, I need to do some other work. I think it’s time to work on another card. I’ve mentioned an Easter card but once again, I’m getting a bit close to be able to do it justice. So I may look at other ideas. Maybe a Birthday card. That would be a nice addition to my Zazzle store.

You know what that means? You might get to see pictures of something other than Sticks next week.

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Yay! That’s done. – Weekly Update February 2, 2016

Posted on February 2, 2016 by SusanG

Hey! Happy Groundhog Day! I’m not really sure I care if the groundhog sees his shadow. The weather is so messed up I don’t think his shadow is going to make much difference if we get an early Spring or not. Mother Nature will do what she wants.

Yay! I finished the rig for Sticks. Well, sort of. I’ll get to that in a moment. I was so glad to finish building the rig. I did want to scream though. Remember that problem I was having with the arms when scaling the global control? It’s what prompted me to start the rig over. Well, it gets fixed in the rig clean up step. Talk about annoying. It wasn’t the easiest thing though. I had some trouble getting the helpers just right. I had to do some weird finagling to get them to not flip out on me.

So here’s how it looks, just the bones, all done up. And also a picture of the rig next to the mesh. Kind of cool I think. Sticks_3d_connected_01292016a_sm_wmSticks_3d_connected_01292016f_sm_wm
Sticks_3d_connected_01292016b_c_sm_wm

 

Here’s a view of the finger rig that was one of the last steps. I didn’t have as many bones to deal with since Sticks doesn’t really have fingers. But I do want to be able to bend the hand like he does have them so I used fewer joints. I ran into a little issue with the control for the Sticks_3d_connected_01292016c_sm_wmthumb. One of them, because of the way it’s oriented and because of how Sticks is designed, the control was buried in the mesh and I couldn’t click on it to manipulate it. So you can see here the original layout of the finger and thumb control and then where I just adjusted the placement of the control so I can get to it.

 

 

Sticks_3d_connected_01302016b

 

 

 

After the rig is built, the next step is to skin or envelope it to the mesh. Or is that the mesh to the rig? Either way the process involves selecting the mesh, applying a skin modifier to it and then adding the bones from the rig that you want to impact the behavior of the mesh. Here you can see the modifier panel for it. There’s way more too it. This is just the modifier and the list of bones.

 

 

 

 

 

Enveloping the mesh and rig isn’t the end. Some strange things can happen with the process and you can have a head bone having influence over a vertex on the foot. This can cause pulling and stretching. Also the mesh will deform, like our skin does, when the rig is moved or posed and that too can cause stretching and pulling, some of which is very ugly. Here is a close up of an example of some of what happens. So this now has to get cleaned up.
Sticks_3d_connected_01312016a_c_sm_wmThe part where the bones from the rig impact the vertices on the mesh is basically called weighting. There is probably some better more technical term for it but Sticks_3d_connected_01302016c_sm_wmthat’s what I’m going to use. So what happens is the different bones have influence over different vertices. Some make perfect sense, the head bone will influence the head mesh. The last index finger bone will influence the vertices of the end of the index finger, but also some of the vertices of the index finger that are a little closer to the hand. Then there are the weird ones where the head bone might influence a vertex on a foot or a right foot bone might influence a left foot vertex. During the weighting, or re-weighting process you go in and adjust the amount of influence a particular bone has over the vertices. Here’s what it looks like when in that mode.

To help with the process of weighting it’s best to set some key frames and then pose your character so you can scrub back and forth from a neutral pose, where everything looks fine, into a more action pose where it might not look fine. The goal is for the mesh to
look nice and smooth in any pose. Here are a few poses for you to enjoy.
Sticks_3d_connected_01302016a_c_sm_wm Sticks_3d_connected_01312016d_c_sm_wm Sticks_3d_connected_01312016f_c_sm_wm Sticks_3d_connected_01312016g_c_wm
You may notice, in the poses where his arms are at his sides or on his hips that his wrists look odd. That’s where I made a mistake with my weighting. I will have to go back in and fix that. I had something all messed up and in trying to fix it, I messed it up even more. I ended up assigning all the wrist vertices to only the hand bone and so when his hands are down, gravity takes over and since there is no influence from any of the arm bones there is nothing to tell the wrist how to hold it’s shape. I was a little frustrated and distressed at the prospect of trying to fix this until I remembered that I may have a way to get back those weight settings from before I messed it up. There was a step, where in showing how to fix something else, the tutorial has you save the envelope weights and then reload them. I believe I still have that file. I should be able to remove and then reapply the weights. It was part way through the process so I will have more to re-do than just the wrists but I think it will actually be easier. I’m going to try it.

You might have noticed the different colors and materials that I applied to Sticks, in the different poses. I had him in a base pink while I was working on the rig just to make him easier to see and see through. I like the dark sort of composite look but I thinks it’s too dark to really show personality so for now I’m going to go with the grey matte look with the blue reflective highlights. It’s much friendlier looking.

Of course, even with the wrist issue, I was and am very excited to have the rig done. I had to see how he is going to look as I make him move so I created this very short, as in don’t blink or you will miss it, animation. It’s just a test to see how it looks.

This is by no means the last you will be seeing or hearing of Sticks. I have at least one still image to setup and capture of him right away. After that, I have an animation in mind that I want to use him for so I will be working on that. I need to find some good reference on creating walk cycles and then maybe how to embed it in the character. It seems that should be possible. To setup a walk cycle so then I can set him on a path to walk along instead of have to animate every step. But I may have to do that for the first animation.

Sticks is going to need some friends to hang out with so I’ll be getting back to some modeling again. After getting this far with Sticks I’m thinking the Alien is going to need to be re-modeled with the express purpose of animating it. I’ve got a few other characters in mind as well. It should be fun.

I’ll also be getting back to more greeting card designs. I have an idea for an Easter type card but I think that’s a coming up a bit sooner than I’ll have it created. There’s also Graduation season coming up. I think I can have something, for that put together so I’ll probably start on that next. Yes, I know that Valentine’s Day is before both of those but really, if I can’t get Easter done in time I’m not likely to have Valentines done, at least not for this year. Maybe for next year.

As you can tell there is lots to do already and now I’m looking at adding learning Maya into the mix. I know I wrote that I’d try to get a post up on the why I’m thinking I need to learn Maya and the Maya versus 3DS Max thing. I spent all my time last week focused on completing the rig for Sticks so that didn’t happen. I still think that will be a good post, though I may want to get into a few tutorials before I write it. I did go ahead and purchase a couple of those books on rigging in Maya. One in particular looks like a good general resource since it tries to cover good practices and theory. I figure the theory and practices should transfer to whatever program I’m using even if some of the specifics don’t.

That’s all the excitement for this update. My immediate plans are to fix Sticks’ wrists and get that pose created. Oh, and get to work on the Graduation card. As always, check back again to see if my plans and reality managed to intersect.

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