Prepping Sticks for Animating

Posted on August 28, 2015 by SusanG

A couple of weeks ago I introduced you to Sticks the new mascot for SusanG Productions. I had him modeled and ready to set up for animating, then I made some adjustments

thinking they would facilitate animating him. They might have, or not, but they also took away some of the character of Sticks.

When I got ready to start the process of rigging Sticks I thought all his pieces needed to be connected so he was one smooth object and not a bunch of pieces. So I attached all his parts and then went about deleting faces and welding points so that he was one object with the one element and not one object with several elements.

Then I set about starting the rigging process. For those who don’t know, rigging for animation is the process of creating bones and controls to make the animating easier. It helps, when rigging a character, to have them in a T-pose, standing straight with arms straight out to the side.

I hadn’t posed Sticks in the T-pose before I connected his parts so I had to do it after. With all his pieces and parts connected I could only get him in more of an A shaped pose without some serious pinching. This is where I could have stopped and re-evaluated but I pressed on only to discover why a T-pose for rigging and not an A-pose.
So why a T-pose and not an A-pose? It turns out to be pretty simple. With a T-pose it’s easier to see the side of the body and easier to figure out where the joints should be. With an A-pose the hands and arms block that view from the side and so make it more difficult to add the bones. Yes, you can do it from the front or back but there are some parts that are just better or more easily done from the side.

Still I persisted and got started adding bones and controls. Here I have the xray feature turned on and you can see how hard it is to see the bones through the hand and arm.

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I continued along to where I had both legs and their basic controls setup. Here’s what it looks like with Sticks in xray mode.

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Here’s what the bones and controls look like with Sticks hidden. It’s kind of interesting, and will get much more cluttered looking.

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Fortunately, I stepped away from the computer for a while. That gave me the opportunity to reconsider my approach. I didn’t like the way things were going to look and deform with everything connected. It wasn’t going to be the Sticks I designed. And I decided I need to make a small adjustment to the design.

I made my design change first. It would be easier than doing it later. In the original design Sticks had no ankles. However, I have one sketch of him where I was working out the 3D idea, and in that, I gave him ankles. When I started rigging I wondereind if maybe he should have ankles and now he does. Adding them was fairly easy. I had the foresight to save the original design of Sticks as a separate file before I connected his parts so I just went back to that file and added the ankles. I saved that and then saved it as a new file so I could adjust his pose and start rigging.

I still needed all the parts attached so he’s one object and so the skinning will work right. And that’s what I did. I just attached everything but I didn’t connect any of it. This way I have one object with several elements. I can select the individual elements and change them without deforming other parts. That’s the beauty of Sticks.

Here he is now in all his current T-pose glory ready to be rigged.

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It maybe that I’m wrong and this idea won’t work either but it’s worth a try and it should maintain the design and personality of Sticks. We’ll see how it goes.

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Weekly Update August 25, 2015 — Learning Things

Posted on August 25, 2015 by SusanG

No, I’m not late or early. I am right on time.

I have been posting the weekly update on the weekends which is ok but not optimal. When I try to have a post up on the weekend it means that any stuff I get done during that
weekend waits until the next weekend before you get to read about it. That’s not fun. I also don’t want you to miss out on the post. I figure you are a bit like me and don’t get to follow up on article notices that come in on the weekend. I do that follow up during the week when I need a break. So my plan is to change the regular posting day to Monday or Tuesday. That way I get to include any weekend fun and you can have it for a weekday break.

On to the fun stuff, working on the guitar stippling piece.

I really focused on the guitar piece this week because I an on vacation from the day job next week. I wanted to get the rest of the basics inked in and the background
completed so I could let it sit for several days while I decide how much additional stippling it needs. I think letting it sit during the week before vacation is ideal because then I have all vacation I can work on it.

While I was working on the guitar piece I noticed something really interesting. As I was painting the background using the acrylic inks I made some mistakes and went a bit
into the guitar body. Needless to say I was quite annoyed. But I waited until I finished the background to fix it. This is where the interesting bit comes in. I had one spot where I had just lightly crossed the line and one spot where the ink went on much thicker. The lighter one was harder to cover to correct it than the heavy one. I suspect this is because the heavier inked area acts as a gesso for the paper so the corrective dots sit on top and don’t get absorbed by the paper. It never occurred to me to gesso or prime the paper. Now, I’m thinking it might be worth a try. Or at least an interesting experiment.

Here’s a photo of it so far.

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I’ve been struggling a bit with the photos I take of the sketchbook pieces. Sometimes I take them with the phone and sometimes with a regular camera. Both the phone and the camera take good pictures in general but for some reason the camera ones seem to wash out the pencil where the phone ones don’t. So I have been using the phone for the
sketchbook pictures. There are a few reasons that I don’t find this the best way to handle this, only one of those reasons being the upload process. Time to figure something out. I checked with my friend Shan in Austin and she uses a DSLR and Photoshop, if needed. As I thought about why hers might work out better, aside from the obvious differences between her art and mine, I found one other big difference. The angle. The nature of her art pieces is such that her photos are taken with the piece upright like it would appear on a wall. I have been taking my photos with the sketchbook flat on a table and shooting straight down on them. I fight shadows quite a bit this way, and, it seems like I have been fighting glare from light bouncing off the graphite. This week, when I started to take the sketchbook photos I got out the table top easel I inherited from my Grandmother and used that. So far, it looks like it may solve my problem.

Though I focused mostly on the guitar piece this week, I did get to work on rigging Sticks some. It turned out to be a good thing that I only got a day or two to work on it as I’ve had to make some changes. The explanation of the changes and progress are a bit long for this post so I will be posting something about it, with pictures, soon. So for those of you interested in the digital 3D art and animation stuff, don’t fret, I have not abandoned it or forgotten you.

And now here are the sketchbook entries for the week. This was a slow starting week and I really didn’t find much inner inspiration to work from. My favorites are the little bird and the person in the Taekwondo uniform. I think the squirrel will be getting some attention in the future. I have plans for it.

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That’s the week that was. I will be on holiday from the day job next week and I’m not traveling so there will still be posts and hopefully lots of project progress.

Remember to check back for that update on Sticks.

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Weekly Update August 16, 2015 — Productivity out the window

Posted on August 16, 2015 by SusanG

Being ill stinks. It takes so long to recover and while you are recovering you don’t feel like doing anything and can’t really concentrate. Which can kill a good work groove and it seems like motivation and productivity take a running jump right out the window. I am still trying to round them up again. They are not cooperating very well.

What that means is that as much as I wanted to work on rigging Sticks, I didn’t even get started on it. I haven’t gotten back to Bernice either. The only thing I managed one evening was a little time working on the guitar piece. It’s still got a ways to go. And a little more on that in a moment.

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I did manage to get something in the sketchbook each day which made me happy. First up is a little guy that may not be so little and I think might be a bit of a mischief maker. I actually woke up from a nap on Sunday with this image in my head, in color even. It was still hanging around on Monday so I decided it wanted out. I really like it and think it might be another one of those fun to develop type of things.

 

Next up is this lovely Lady Bug, or Lady Bird as some call it.

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I forgot what I started out thinking I was going to draw here. Whatever it was, I ended up with an earbud. It’s not exactly like the ones I have. Still I was keeping those a in mind as I was drawing this one. Personally, I love my earbuds.

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I decided I would make another attempt at drawing a tree from imagination with no reference. I feel like this came out better than the last one. As you might guess, this is a climbing tree. We had one of these in a couple of places that we lived when I was a kid, though we didn’t nail a wood ladder to it.

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20150815_101703_sm_crop_wmFor this one, I was thinking of the bat version of Dracula in Hotel Transylvania and tried to create a creature a little like that. It didn’t go quite as I had hoped. I got the snout wrong for it to be bat like and so it came out a little disturbing. Guess that makes bats another creature I need to practice drawing.

And that was the sketching. I thought I might get a rare Saturday sketch in but I got busy doing chores before I could put pencil to paper.

Among those chores were errands. One of which was to find frames, and mattes, for the pumpkin piece, which is already complete, and the guitar piece I’m still working on. I was partially successful in this venture. I found a great frame and a matte for the pumpkin piece. I’ve already put them together and it looks awesome. 20150816_090700_sm_crop_wmI ran into trouble with finding the right size for the guitar piece and I don’t understand why. The pumpkin piece was fairly easy at 11 inches by 14 inches. The guitar piece is 14 inches by 17 inches. I couldn’t find anything with a aperture of that size. Not even close. I guess I will have to make a trek to the art supply store and hope they have what I need. If not I have an option of cropping it down to a 11 inche by 14 inche size though I will lose some of the work behind the matte. To do it I will have to trim the board down. I’m not sure I like that part, though I kind of like the idea of basically cropping it to the smaller size. I think it will make a bigger impact than trying to keep it the full size. Still, I want to make sure that I can’t find something to fit the full size. It looks like next weekend will involve and excursion.

Now that I’m feeling better I expect to get back to working on things. Sticks still needs to be rigged, the guitar piece needs to be worked on, and then there are all the other projects to work on. I wonder what will get done this next week. Check back and find out.

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Weekly Update August 10, 2015 — The Body Thwarts the Mind’s Intentions

Posted on August 10, 2015 by SusanG

Yes, this is a day or two late. I always intend to have my update posted on Saturday and it usually doesn’t get done until Sunday. This week it’s Monday. The only real excuse I have is that I spent the weekend sick with some upper respiratory viral thing. It made thinking rather difficult, as well as breathing and sleeping. And it meant that all the best intentions I had of getting started on things early in the day and getting chores done and projects worked on, they all went out the door as if being sucked out by a vacuum. It’s very frustrating. I managed only that which really needed to be done over the weekend and everything else has been deferred.

That isn’t to day that I didn’t make some real progress on things this week. I did spend a more time working on the guitar stippling project. That is coming along and I think I have decided what to do about the background. So I’m looking forward to getting that much farther along. No picture of it this week though.

I also worked on my mascot for SusanG Productions. I came up with the idea for him a few monthes ago and have been working on just how I wanted to create him for use since I
want to be able to animate him. Well, in a moment between projects at the day job, I figured out what I could do. It was a pretty obvious answer but I wanted to make sure it
retained the personality of my original stick sketches. I used 3DS Max to build him and put him together. I still need to rig him so I can animated him. For now though, I would like to introduce you to Sticks, the mascot for SusanG Productions.

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It really was my big accomplishment for the week. Now I’m excited to get him rigged and then to start animating him. It might even get me spurred on to work on some of his
friends. This could be a lot of fun.

So to the sketchbook now. I will admit that I started a little slow with ideas this week and when I couldn’t think of anything else on Monday morning I decided to draw my hand. Not very original but still a good exercise.

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This guy reminds me of an animal that when I saw a picture of it it made me think of an either a wrinkly baby or a really old wrinkly person. It had great personality to it. This isn’t that animal as that animal had much bigger eyes and ears but it is inspired by it. I think it’s kind of cute in an odd sort of way.

 

 

It’s a fish. It’s just a fish with big fish eyes and fish lips. And as simple as it looks it was fun to do and amazingly satisfying.20150809_110928_sm_crop_wm

So I wanted to do a freaked out deranged sort of bird of a cockatiel or parakeet. This didn’t really turn out the way I had hoped. It did turn out a bit Frankenstein-like. I think I got the head too tall and not sure the eye is quite right. Oh well, it does serve as a slightly disturbing picture of a budgie though.

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This started out all about the hat. That was what I was drawing, though not from reference, just from imagination. At some point it needed more so it got someone wearing the hat. I’m actually kind of pleased with the way this turned out. Not my best portrait work but certainly a likeness of someone I don’t doubt. I really like the way the nose came out. Those are always a challenge for me. And the mouth as just a thin line really worked out as well.20150809_111045_sm_crop_wm

There was one other thing accomplished this week. Well, actually this weekend. I finally got my other website working. Or rather the developers at GoDaddy were finally able
to clear an A record that had the site being intermittently available. It was quite frustrating. But things look stable now so I guess I had better post an update over there.

Here’s hoping this week pans out better and things get back on track. I have a few projects that I really want to work on and even a couple with some deadlines so it would be really good if I could kick this virus thing and get back on track. I’d especially like to make some good progress rigging Sticks as well as some really good progress on the guitar piece. Everything else I will consider bonus.

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Weekly Update August 2, 2015 – Adventures in…Website Moving

Posted on August 2, 2015 by SusanG

Instead of having endless fun with the day job challenges this week, all my fun was had in moving websites. Fun might be a bit of an exageration. It was somewhat of a challenge. And now it’s done. I’ll tell you more about it in a bit.

It turns out the website move took a considerable amount of my time for a couple of days and that ate into my 3d modeling and sculpting time as well as my regular art time. So I don’t have as much exciting stuff to show and tell about artistically. I did get some things worked on though. I would show you what I’ve done on my Alien in 3ds Max except I don’t really feel like there is much to show on it for now. I have most of the head and face put together and I’m about to start adding the body part. Maybe there will me something more interesting on that next weekend.

I also got a chance to work on the stippling piece I started of the guitar, or part of a guitar. It’s coming along nicely. I have a friend in Austin who does these awesome paintings of cars, or parts of them, and she has said that chrome is really hard to paint. I think I agree, especially when it comes to trying to render it in stippling. Tricky. Still here’s how it is as of today.

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I think I might have the base chrome color worked out and I should be able to build from there. As you can see, half the page is blank, this is intentional and it will be the “background” so to speak. I’m planning on it being a deep dark blue but I have one real dilemma. I can’t decide if I am going to do the background in colored pencil or in ink and stippling as well.

Monday morning came way too early as it always does. So this is what showed up in the sketchbook.

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20150802_0379_sm_crop_wmTuesday was a little better. I was looking at a magazine the night before and I was looking at the article about either sci-fi or fantasy landscapes. One of the pictures was a house on stilts. And I got to thinking about a sci-fi house on stilts and having a hover vehicle parked underneath. Then I decided my hover vehicle should be a little like a Segway, at least for steering. So this is the Hover 5000.

 

One of the premium cable services has started showing the movie “Big Hero 6” which I happen to really like for a whole bunch of reasons. I watched all or part of it at least 4 times last week, and I own it on blu-ray so I could have watched it more. Anyway, with that much viewing Baymax was sort of stuck in my head. So I decided to do my best rendition of him. I was really happy with it until I figured out that I left off his hands. Sorry, Baymax. By the way the copyright on the image is for my rendering, not for the subject matter the copyright for the subject belongs to Disney and Marvel Studios.

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About mid-week I decided to try to tackle moving my websites. Before I get to that whole process, I should explain a little of what it is I was actually doing, and maybe a little of why. So have had my web hosting account for 10 years or so and it was on old technology. I noticed that the sites were a little slower to load than I like. So when GoDaddy called about all my stuff and to see if they could help I decided it was time to see about making some improvements, so I upgraded, I think. What that meant was that I needed to get my websites moved from the original hosting account and platform and to the new one. There turned out to be some pitfalls with that. I was able to move this sight fairly easily. I tested my other site by moving a copy of it down to my laptop. When I did that I learned a bunch of things not to do and a few things to do. It would have all been great and gone really much smoother if I had moved this site first. I didn’t. I tried to move the other site first. 20150802_0386_sm_crop_wmThis turns out to have been a not so good an idea as it was also the name of the hosting account for the old hosting and it sort of blew things up. So I put it all back, basically, and moved this site. I did break it at least once. But after I had it up and going I decided to move the other site and then figure out what to do about the hosting account. Once both sites were up I took a break. When I returned to finish things up, the sites weren’t showing up. Panic. I called GoDaddy tech support and they verified I did everything right and assured me it would be ok, it would take 24 to 48 hours for the IP address change to populate through the internet. All this to tell you that this sketch was inspired by that adventure. It’s a lot like what it felt like, a chemical experiment in a beaker that was bubbling and smoking and had the potential to completely blow up. The fact that I can post this and you can read it is proof that it did not explode spectacularly, though it felt like it was about to at the time.

By the end of the week I had solved most of my website issues, both sites had been moved and were up. This seemed like a good time for something lighter and sort of cheery. I
didn’t really have the time to finish it out the way I would have like. I suppose I will revisit the subject a time or two and maybe one of those times I will get it finished out nicely.

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I have this stick figure character that I’ve been working on, mostly in my mind. I want to animate him in 3d. Finding a good way to do that has not been easy. I really liked the lose lines of the pencil sketch and wanted to carry that over into the model but I couldn’t figure out how to do that. Not easily anyway, and certainly not elegantly. I worked on that idea some weeks ago and decided to take a break from it. This week I revisited it again, a lot because of that website move work I was doing. Anyway, I got to thinking about it and wondered if it would look ok if it was made out of solid 3d pieces and to not worry about the outline look, so I sketched it out a bit and I think it’s going to work. Once I get it ready I’ll post something. Though, for now, I’ve still got to get the idea into the computer. If it works like I want, it should be fun.

That’s the way things went this week. If you tried to visit the site Wednesday or Thursday and had trouble, I apologize. Either the IP address was still populating or you hit it while I was trying to get something to work which was causing the site to run really slow. I will try not to do that again. And with a little luck, this next week will go a bit smoother and there will be more to see soon.

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