Weekly Update November 3, 2015 – An Alien and a Snowman

Posted on November 3, 2015 by SusanG

An Alien and a Snowman walked into a…wait…wrong story.
An Alien and a Snowman knocked at the door…
Well, that’s a bit closer, I suppose, if you consider they are the only projects I really worked on this week.

alien_10272015b_sm_wmI did spend a lot of time working on the Alien, Greezbly. Once I got his clothes separated off, then I was ready to do a bit more refining and detailing. I polished some surfaces to get them smoother and the edges crisper. It has taken me a few tries to find the polish brush in ZBrush useful. In this case it worked well for some of the trim on the shirt. Along with the polishing I tried to add a bit of detailing to give the idea of some wrinkles at the joints and a little sag at the knees. Just to add more detail.

Once I had that detailing add, I decided to use an alpha to get more texture on the skin. Of course this lured me right into starting the polypaint process. One squirrel leads to another. I got half way through the polypainting and had to stop for a bit. I wasn’t terribly pleased with how my color choices were working out. Here I’ve got the face, hands, and shirt painted and just a glossy/shiny material on the pants and boots.

alien_10312015a_sm_wm

 

Even though I wasn’t excited about the color direction I went ahead and finished everything. I added some lights and did some test renders. I got all but the floor pass. It turns out, I didn’t have the floor turned on. So I tried it again with the floor on. It was a good thing. The floor pass was useful. It added just a bit of light to the lower areas so that the feet weren’t lost in the dark. Now I understand part of the reason so many people model their characters on a base or platform. You can use contrasting colors on it to get a better balance.

Here’s where I’m at with Greezbly. The first is just a straight image export from ZBrush and the second is the composite done in Photoshop. I still want to add a bag sort of thing and I’m not entirely sold on the colors so I may easily obsess over Greezbly again this next week.

Greezbly_11022015a_sm_wm Greezbly_comp2_sm_crop_wm

Of course I do have other things to work on and tend to this week so I may have to temper the alien obsession a bit. This Friday (November 6th) is the reception at FuManchu Cupcakes in Charlotte. It’s from 7pm to 10pm. If you are in the area stop by and have
some great cupcakes and enjoy some really fabulous art. Yours truly will be there.

Now back to last week’s adventures. The Snowman. I finished modeling him. He was a lot of fun to work on. Probably because I’m really pleased with the way he’s turned out and he wasn’t much of a struggle to get right. Though I did have to do some work on the stick arms. At first, the angle I had them at, as well as a lack of bend in them, made him look really creepy. Snowman2015_10302015a_sm_crop_wmSo I adjusted the overall angle of the arms and offset them a little and then I adjusted the bend where the elbow would be and made a few more tweaks to the hand type area. This helped quite a bit and made him more friendly than creepy. The next trick was to add the scarf. Since I’m in 3ds Max for the Snowman, and what will be this year’s Holiday Card, I had to figure out how to create a cloth looking scarf using box modeling. It turned out to not be that hard. A torus for the base primitive and a few faces extruded and then a few more and I was off and running. Getting it to lay nicely down the Snowman’s body took some patience and tinkerling. And the fringe. I had a rough idea of what to do there but when I Snowman2015_11012015k_sm_crop_wmwent to do it, it didn’t work out the way I wanted. I had to add quite a few edge loops to get the a nice set of polygons on the end so that I could bevel them out long. This worked except they were attached to each other. I ended up doing half of them first and then angling them a little off from the straight out direction so they would have some distance between themselves and the next batch. It worked like a charm. Edge loops around the ends of the fringe help to keep some of the shape.

 Snowman2015_11012015l_sm_crop_wm

I did get to work on Sticks a little this week. As I expected the next few videos were on rigging the eyes. But I watched through them anyway. It was a good thing I did as there was some additional clean up in moving items to different layers, that was covered.
So I did the clean up and continued to watch the videos. I finished with the eyes and now it’s on to more of the facial controls. The tutorial I am using is designed for a character with eyes and eyebrows. Neither of which Sticks has. So I’ll be watching more of the tutorials until I get the the arm rig when I will start to work again.

There is plenty more to do. With my Snowman modeled I’m ready to start on the packages. And of course I’ll probably have some updates to Greezbly. And let’s not forget the reception at FuManchu Cupcakes. So check back for more news and updates.

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Weekly Update October 27, 2015 – Starting Over and Figuring Out

Posted on October 27, 2015 by SusanG

Not everything went as planned when I started working on things this week. Which really isn’t surprising. This week there was annoying and there was good stuff. I think I can be happy with that. Sure beats there being bad stuff.

Since I didn’t get back to working on rigging Sticks the previous week, that was the first thing I started working on. I was going to finish the spine rig. At least I thought. But when I got the file open and started trying to follow along, things weren’t behaving correctly, or at least, not as they looked like they should behave in the tutorial. I spent at least one evening trying to figure out what was messed up and couldn’t. Something must have got set wrong and I couldn’t back track well enough to determine what it was. And though I tried deleting and recreating some of the last bits, it didn’t seem to do any good. So I decided that the next day I would just start the spine rig over. I saved the file as a new name before I started, just in case. And then I got started deleting the spine rig and starting it over.

The good news is that whatever I did wrong the first time through, I didn’t do it again this time. I was also careful to check settings and such frequently in case it was something I did inadvertently. I got all the way through it with everything acting and functioning as it should. And I even got to the next step which was the head/neck rig. Next up are the eyes, which I will watch through in case there is something I need to do, but Sticks doesn’t have eyes so there shouldn’t be much work there. I think I’m really waiting to get to the arms next and then skinning. So I might be getting close. At least I hope so. Here are some of the screen shots of the rigging now.

Sticks_3d_connected_10252015d_sm_wm Sticks_3d_connected_10252015f_sm_wm Sticks_3d_connected_10252015c_sm_wm Sticks_3d_connected_10252015b_sm_wm

I will admit, working on Sticks really took up the bulk of the week so I didn’t get back to the Snowman, though it’s on this week’s list of things I want to get worked on. I did get a little time to work on my painting of the guitar head stock. It’s coming along. I’ve been trying to do all the light stuff first as it lets me be able to follow the reference lines better than if I started with the dark stuff, though I may need to move into some of the darker bits soon, perhaps after a little more chrome work.

DSCN0540_sm_crop_wmI also got back to working on the alien, Greezbly. I was reading a lesson in a magazine and as part of that, they were going to extrude, or more accurately, extract a part of the surface to make the clothing or something. When I read that I realized that the function or tool I was looking for to get the clothing off of Greezbly was the Extract tool in ZBrush. It’s actually under the Sub-Tool pallet. So I first masked off just the shirt area to extract, but I tried to do it at a higher resolution and after it took forever to do, and then crashed the program, I figured out to use a lower subdivision level. I had to adjust the thickness a couple of times but then I was able to get the shirt as a separate sub-tool like I wanted. I then inverted the mask to do the pants, though I first had to adjust the mask to not include the boots or the rest of the body. Then I inverted again and adjusted the mask so that it was only the boots. In the end I got all the right sub-tools for the clothes. Next up, I duplicated the original body, so I didn’t lose anything in the detail in case things don’t work out. Then I used one copy of the body to smooth out the details. They aren’t really needed since all that detail will be in the clothing. Here are some shots to show that it worked. I have one of Greezbly with no clothes on and the body detail all smoothed out and then I have them as I add one piece of clothing at a time. And finally one with some of the detail starting to stand out on the shirt and pants. I’m not done with either so they are works in progress.

Alien_10252015a_sm_wm Alien_10252015b_sm_wm

 Alien_10252015c_sm_wm Alien_10252015d_sm_wmAlien_10252015e_sm_wm

I’ll be getting back to Sticks and Greezbly this week. I am going to try to get back to the Snowman too since I have more parts to work on to get that Holiday Card put together. I’m hoping to have it ready for the store by December 1 and while I do have the month, there will no doubt be packs of squirrels to chase between now and then as well as all sorts of other stuff. Including the reception at FuManchu Cupcakes. Yes, there will be a reception for the art for this round at FuManchu Cupcakes on November 6th from
7pm to 10pm. If you are in the Charlotte area and can make it by to see all the art, that would be great. I will be there. For now, here is a picture of the art pieces that I have there.

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And aside from that, and Halloween, who knows what else I will manage to get up to this week. You will just have to check back to find out.

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The Jack-o-lantern 2015

Posted on October 22, 2015 by SusanG

The Jack-o-lantern started out as a sculpt of a pumpkin in ZBrush. I wasn’t sure if I was going to make it into a jack-o-lantern or just leave it as a pumpkin but as I got close to completing the sculpt I got curious.

That’s the best way to learn things right? To get curious. Look at something and think, ‘I wonder…’. And that’s what happened. I first decided to try to carve out the eyes. It didn’t work out quite as I had hoped. I used the insert brush in subtract mode but I had the dynamesh settings too low and I lost all the detail I’d already sculpted in.

After I fixed the dynamesh resolution I tried again, only to figure out that I needed to use subtract mode to get the results I wanted. Yeah, I forgot. Still that was pretty easy once I remembered to hold down the right keys. And it worked. I got nice indents for the eyes. IJackolantern_2015_10142015a_sm_wm did a mouth that way as well. But the pumpkin wasn’t hollow or it may have been but because of the way I added the or subtracted the eyes and mouth that’s not how it worked. If I had wanted a hole all the way through that would have been different but, because I was trying to put a hole only through the shell, it didn’t work out the way I wanted. Here’s how it looked just trying to hollow out those openings.

The teeth for the mouth were fairly easy. I just used and insert box brush and dynamesh to create those. Though I did have to do a little work with the transpose gizmo that makes me so crazy. I think I might, and I stress might, be getting a little better at it.

Still it wasn’t the way I wanted. So, to get it hollow I tried using the insert brush to subtract a fairly good size sphere from within the pumpkin. The trick here turned out to be making sure it was large enough to intersect with the openings of the eyes and mouth. It took a couple of tries and I ultimately did it twice to get the size cavity I wanted. This is how it looked after I did that.Jackolantern_2015_10142015b_sm_wm

At this point, I thought I wanted to have the top come off, like you usually do with a jack-o-lantern. So I figured out how to use the masking tool and how to split the top off. The problem that created was that I was going to have to close up the openings created by subtracting that sphere from the inside. I basically had a shell but with the top edges open so it could have been more like a mold. I did try to close things up on the top but every thing I did, I kept loosing my detail. It also wasn’t really working the way I wanted. Since it wasn’t working I decided it wasn’t worth it at that moment to try to figure out how to re-project the detail back onto the surface. So I gave up on having the top come off. I backed up and left it as it was. That did make it a little difficult to paint the inside.

When it came time for color, I chose to polypaint instead of texture. I used an alpha and aJacko_10152015a_sm_wm color spray brush for all the painting. I probably could have chosen a better material than I did but at least it wasn’t the red wax. It took a little work to find the right color for the inside and at times it seemed to fade so I had to be a bit heavy handed to get good coverage. That turned out true for the outside as well. Here is an in progress shot of the painting.

Once I got it painted I played around with the lights. I was really trying to add one to the inside of the pumpkin so it would look like it was lit from within. But that didn’t play out quite right. I tried a few different placement options and types of lights and such and it just didn’t do what I wanted. Remember, this is still in ZBrush. I didn’t take the jack-o-lantern into another program to light it or render it or even paint it. All done so far in ZBrush. Still, I got some decent lighting I could work with.Jacko_10172015a_sm_wm

Then I started with the rendering part. This I saw a little bit of at the ZBrush Summit this year and it stuck enough that I was able to poke around enough to figure out how to get the render as a file, and more importantly, how to get different render passes. And this is where it starts to get a little more involved.

So render passes are basically different types of renders of the scene. There might be one that is a mask that can be used to create a mask for say a background or a foreground, there might be a lighting pass, or a shadow pass, or a color pass. Two that can be very helpful are a subsurface shading or scattering pass and an ambient occlusion pass. The think about the different passes is they help to emphasize different area of the image. As an example, the ambient occlusion pass helps to mark the shadows and areas that aren’t seen as much. The subsurface pass can help to add a bit of depth and translucency to a material, for something like skin.

What you do with all these different passes is you take them into an image processing program and you composite them together. Depending on the order you put them in you can get different results. It seems to be very common to use Photoshop for the
compositing process. Since that is what I have, that is what I used. This project was my first attempt at compositing and I learned a lot. I had to try a lot of things. And Ijacko_10172015_final_crop_sm_wm discovered how big a difference just one pass can make. As an example here is a
composite of the image with 5 different passes. The one missing is the ambient occlusion, well and the subsurface one but my material didn’t have any of that so I didn’t get one.

It’s ok but a little dark at the top, you can’t really see the stem. Besides just the different passes I also duplicated one or two of the passes to help emphasize some feature. I put these different passes on different layers and then I set them do different modes, like multiply, subtract, and things like that. I didn’t find quite the blend options I wanted at the time but I think I know where to look now.

So with all the passes and a few duplicates things were looking good. But I wanted an ambient occlusion pass. From my reading it seems this is one of the really powerful passes you can use. It took a couple of tries to figure out how to get that out of ZBrush, but once I did and was able to add it to the stack in Photoshop it made a big difference. You can see here how it all looks more realistic and balanced.

jacko_fr_10172015_final_crop_wmI’m super pleased with the way this turned out. I could say especially with it being my first attempt at compositing, but I don’t think that is really a factor in my being please with the result. I did learn a lot of stuff doing this and I know I made some mistakes, like not labeling the layers with the type of pass that I was using. That’s ok. The next one I do, I will remember these things and it will be even better.

Happy Halloween.

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Weekly Update October 20, 2015 – Somewhat More Productive Than Expected

Posted on October 20, 2015 by SusanG

Since I started off my week last week with spending an entire evening reading a novel, and a good portion of the next evening finishing it, the week turned out a bit more successful than I expected. I had feared that with burning the midnight oil on Monday I would not be able to get anything done during the week due to being so tired, and yet that turned out not to be the case. I had just enough time between the day job and Taekwondo class or my work out that I was able to fit in an hour or so each night and make progress on several projects.

While I didn’t get back to rigging Sticks, I did get the stage or scene for his animation created. I needed the text of the name of the company created in 3d and in a manner that Sticks can interact with the letters. The first step was deciding on a font. Then I had to figure out how to work with them in 3ds Max and make them three dimensional. Though before I could make them 3d I had to figure out how to handle the spacing. First I created the text as just flat on the floor, as one object of text. This was to get the spacing. That was using the top view. Then using the front view I created each letter as it’s own object. That meant I had to move it into place and get everything properly spaced. That was a bit tedious. Once they were all ready I had to decide how to give them depth. I tried using the shell modifier but it did some really odd stuff with edges and points so I got rid of that. All I wanted to do was extrude the face out to add depth. So, I tried the extrude tool and it worked. Of course you have to make sure you are getting the front face. It turns out that I tried to select something not quite the front face a time or two. But it worked out. Here is a shot of how it will start out.

SGP_Scene_10172015h

SGP_Scene_asLogo_10172015a

And here is a shot of how it will end up, which is going to be part of the logo. I say part because the other part will include Sticks and he’s not in the scene yet. I even used it to set up a sort of welcome or starting page for the website. It’s just something to get started. You can see it at: http://susangproductions.com

 

I worked on the pumpkin. I decided to try to make a jack-o-lantern out of it. I was successful at it though it took a few tries and I didn’t quite get what I wanted. I did learn a bunch of stuff that I will be using the next time I want to try something like that, with a hollow interior. I also didn’t quite get the lighting I really wanted. But I learned about compositing and how to get some of the different render passes out of ZBrush. It was involved enough that I will save that for another post this week, just about the pumpkin. For now, here is a picture out of ZBrush.

Jacko_10172015a_sm_wm

And also one of the composites that I did. I used Photoshop for that part but the painting and all the render passes came from ZBrush.

jacko_fr_10172015_final_crop_wm

I worked on the alien a little as well. Mostly working out detailing and tightening that up. The alien has a name now, Greezbly, and a bit of a back story. I still want to give it a bag type of accessory in addition to painting it.

AlienSept2015_10182015c_sm_wm

I started on the pieces for the winter holiday or Christmas scene. I want to do another card like last year and have been thinking about it for several months. I have a scene already sketched out that I’m going to work on creating with maybe an embellishment or two. Here’s one of the components so far.

Snowman2015_10182015g_bgrnd_sm_wmI was going to start on it soon but a conversation with a co-worker at the day job prompted me to consider starting it sooner rather than later. That same conversation also prompted me to re-visit something I had thought about several months ago. Which is, putting some of the pieces I create up for sale as cards on Zazzle.

So, if you like the card I created last year and sent out through email, and would like a physical one for yourself, or would like to send some to friends or family, it can now be purchased from my Zazzle shop at: SusanG_Productions Store  I am working on having the new card, for this year, available by early December.

As you can see, in addition to a bit of art work, this week, I opened a store and created a small web page. It was quite busy and successful I think and that was in spite of having to spend some time on Saturday working at the day job because it was patching weekend.

I have a couple more things to do before this post goes live. I will be taking down my Patreon creator site for the time being. I may put it back up at a later date. For now I will revert it back to just a regular account. So I will remove that link from this website. I am also going to be adding a link for my Zazzle store to this website.

As for this week, I will be writing a post about the jack-o-lantern adventure as well as getting back to rigging Sticks and working on the new Holiday card. Oh, about the Halloween project. I think, for this year, that will be the jack-o-lantern. I’ll work on
something more elaborate for next year. Just don’t forget to check back soon to read about the jack-o-lantern.

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Weekly Update October 13, 2015 – A Bit More Arting Than Slacking

Posted on October 13, 2015 by SusanG

I am quite pleased to share that I managed a bit more arting this past week than slacking. I can’t say that I spent endless hours in the studio working on things. I did spend some time each day or nearly such, working on some art or modeling endeavor.

I spent more time working on the Pumpkin model in ZBrush. I’m still not sure what I’m going to do with it but I think I need to decide soon and get to it. Mid-October is here and if I want it to be a Halloween piece I need to get it decided and get it finished. Though I might be close to being finished with the model of the Pumpkin. It’s come along really nice. A few more adjustments and it might be ready for color. I’m thinking I will polypaint it.

Pumpkin_Fall2015_10072015b_sm_wm  Pumpkin_Fall2015_10072015d_sm_wm

The Alien got eye-balls. Yes in no longer looks at you from gaping holes in its head. They turned out to be not too difficult to add. I think the most annoying bit was how big the sphere was when I inserted it. It was annoying primarily because it meant I had to scale it down to fit correctly. As I might have mentioned, I’m not entirely friends with the transform gizmo in ZBrush, particularly when it comes to scaling. I did however manage a truce with it and got an eye-ball scaled down to fit. Then I figured out how to duplicate the scaled down sphere. I thought there was a mirror option for that as well, and I’m sure there is but I couldn’t find it. Without the mirror option I had to place the duplicate sphere manually. Back to that transform gizmo. At least this was just to move it. I do much better with the gizmo if I’m just moving things. I’m pleased with how the Alien is coming along. Here’s a look.

AlienSept2015_10082015b_sm_crop_wm AlienSept2015_10082015c_sm_crop_wm

And I finally got back to the rigging of Sticks. When we last left off I had just started the spine portion of the rig and then of course so many things happened and I have not spent as much time working on him as I would like. However, I carved out some time this week to open up 3DS Max and get a little farther with the help of Digital Tutors. So here’s what it looked like when I last updated you about Sticks and also a couple of shots of what it looks like now. It’s starting to become a little bit of a jumble.

Sticks_3d_connected_09102015b_sm_wm Sticks_3d_connected_10112015a_sm_wm Sticks_3d_connected_10112015c_sm_crop_wmI even got in some painting this week. I think I told you about the painting of the guitar head-stock that I started right after I finished the stippling ink piece of the Telecaster guitar. Well, I confess, I haven’t worked on it that much since I first started it. I have a feeling there are several reasons at play with regards to that, and it has me, yet again, re-thinking some plans for the studio. That’s a whole other post and train of thought. Back to the painting. I managed some time to work on it this past week as well. I think I worked on it a little over and hour. And yes, those are dots. That’s sort of the point of this experiment. I want to try stippling in acrylic paint with a brush or that sort of device to see how it works versus using pen and ink which can take a really long time for some pieces, or maybe that’s just me. For now here is an updated “WIP” (work in progress) of it.

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As you can see the last week turned out to be more productive than not, which really pleases me. Not just because I prefer to be productive but also because it means I made the effort to do something I really enjoy doing and want to do instead of defaulting to something else. Perhaps I will be as generous with my art this week and have more to share next week. You will have to check back to find out.

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