Weekly Update – April 16, 2015

Posted on April 16, 2015 by SusanG

Some weeks are more productive than others. This week has turned out to be fairly productive, just not with a lot of variety. And that’s ok.

Over the weekend I got really tucked into working on the folding chair for the TKD Guy project and that has continued. I made some really good progress and I have been able to keep that momentum going. Which means, that is pretty much all I have been working on this week. I’m finding that there are some parts of the chair that I can create just from some photos I found on office supply sites, and then there are some parts that I need better reference photos. That means I am probably headed to one of those actual office supply stores to get some better reference pictures. We’ll call it a field trip.

I got a little sketchbook time in. Not the digital kind, the physical pencil and paper kind. Here are a few the most recent ones.

DSCN0230_small DSCN0227_small DSCN0231_small

One of the other big steps for this week was setting up my Patreon site. I’ve included a link at the side of the page if you are interested. The way Patreon works is that you pledge support for a project either on a monthly basis or a per creation basis. You can pledge as little as $1 or as much as you want and you can cap how much you pay per month. It’s a really nice setup. I was going to set it up as a monthly subscription but since some of the models take a while for me to create, I think a per creation is better. So right now, what a patron would be supporting is per completed model for the TKD Guy project. That is a completely modeled and rigged, if it requires it, model. So the chair won’t be done until it is completely modeled and rigged so it can easily be animated. Other creations to be supported would be fully finished static scenes like the Holiday Card or even, when finally finish, an animation.

I still want to get back to the dolphin and crane sculpts that I started in ZBrush. But as I am on a roll with the chair I think I’ll see it through. I do want to have a couple of really nice sculpts completed by the ZBrush Summit at the end of September so I may take some time in the next couple of weeks and focus on those to get them finished up and polished.

I found a great tool for handling reference pictures. I was reading an article that one of the tools used was Kuadro. I looked it up and it’s great. I’ve used it a couple of times already. It lets you create a reference set of photos for what you are working on and then opens them up all at once. The pictures, once open have a low profile frame so there isn’t a lot of wasted screen space and you can easily zoom and then pan in the frame. I really like this tool. The only thing I would like to see, and it might have it I just haven’t found it, is a display of the file name of the picture. Then again, it is a pretty awesome tool for free or donation.

Oh, and one last thing. I was excited about this. Autodesk has announced the new features for 3DS Max 2016 and for Maya 2016. I’m more excited about 3DS Max since that’s what I’m using right now and the new features seem to be more across the board. I’m looking forward to seeing the rendering improvements and options I think that will be cool and might allow me to delay a dedicated renderer for a little longer. But there are a lot of great things to come. It looks like a lot of the Maya improvements are in the Bifrost tool and since I haven’t had a chance to use that yet, I won’t know the difference. Autodesk also announced the Mudbox 2016 and several other updates this week. So much news and great stuff to look forward to.

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Now to Create Straps for this Target

Posted on April 14, 2015 by SusanG

The handles are on the target so we’ve got something to hold on to but it still needs the
straps that you can put your arm through. On the one that I have, they are more like two
flaps sticking out but they velcro together. One side is sewn in and the other side is
connected using a metal ring through a loop that is sewn into the target. So that’s what
I’m going to try to replicate.

Here’s what I’m working from for this.

IMG_0408

First I wanted to get the loop on the target created so I extruded the face from the target
a couple of times so that I would have a box sort of situation that I could remove the
faces to make a hole or tunnel through the item. Then I used connect to create the inside
faces. I really need to find a better way to do this. Getting to the edge I wanted in such
a tight space was not easy. I did try going to wireframe view but it was very difficult to
differentiate the edge I wanted from everything else. Several undos were needed for this.

Once I got the loops on the target created I selected the faces I could get to on one of
them and then copied them so that I had the loop that was going to be part of the strap. It
meant that I needed to close up the opening in bottom of that loop. So I created the face
to close that up and I had my other loop. At this point I decided to create the ring. Since
it’s a pretty rectantular looking ring I opted to use a box and edge loops to create it. I
will be applying the turbosmooth modifier to it later so that should round it out just
enough.

Even so, using a box to create the ring to connect the two loops wasn’t as straight on as I
thought it should be. Probably just me. But it took a bit of moving and adjusting to get
the size and shape just right. It also took some adjusting of the openings of the loops. I TKD_Guy_03292015c
could get the ring nicely shaped but then it didn’t quite fit the opening right. Once I got the second loop and the ring created, I copied them to the other side. That cut down on some of the tweaking that was needed. Now, I just had to adjust the loop on the target.

You may notice in the image that the loops look a little strange. There is a reason for it but I didn’t catch it at this point. I just kept on modeling.

Since the strap that is sewn into the target is on the bottom I set to modeling that. First I extruded the top face of one of the places where the straps sewn to the back overlap. This gave me enough geometry to work with to create the strap. I extruded both of the side faces once and then just the top side face again TKD_Guy_03292015fto make a the longer part. Not bad. So I did the other one. Just two more straps to go.

From here it was time to create the straps on the other end. I used the top face and extruded it up, away from the surface so that I would have two layers. Then I extruded the side faces once and then deselected the bottom of the side faces and extruded just the top side face again only much longer. The same basic steps as before. I did that for the last strap as well. Next they needed to look like they are touching or velcro-ed together. This required angling the top strap down and the bottom one up a little. Selecting the edges was a little of a challenge at this point but with wire frame view turned on it helped.

I thought I was all set. I tried a render thinking this was going to be great. It wasn’t,
something was weird. The strap didn’t look right. The problem was one I haven’t dealt with much since I worked on the window frame on the dishes project. I had managed to get my normals flipped so it looked like they weren’t there you were just looking through them. At this point, it didn’t matter how I got them flipped, I just needed to see which ones they were and fix them. SO I turned on the option to view the normals direction and then I
right-clicked on the faces that needed to be flipped and chose the flip normal option. All
fixed. And now it looks like this.

TKD_Guy_03292015g

As you can see from the picture at the top, these targets are not this sharp and square. I will need to refine them and make them look like they are filled with foam and have been beaten on. But, for now, the basics are there.

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Weekly Update – April 10, 2015

Posted on April 10, 2015 by SusanG

The cool thing this week, is that I discovered I have 7.2 hours of Swing Out Sister that I can listen to while working on art projects. As a result of that, and time not getting to far away from me, I had two evenings that I got a lot of work done. I had a really good time on my trip to the art supply store where I purchased a stack of new sketchbooks all ready for me to fill them up with ideas and doodles and such.

Lately I have been putting the same blu-ray disc in and playing it multiple times in a row while I work on things on the computer. But late one night I was looking over the artwork of Danny Williams on his Art Station site and he had some really pleasant jazz music playing with one of his videos. That sent me looking for an online station or something with some jazz. The station I found played about 10 songs in repetition and one was a Swing Out Sister tune. So, to my own music collection I wandered, and well, 7.2 hours of Swing Out Sister. Yay!

Sleigh_rev_04032015aBut that’s not the art that you were wondering if I made any progress on. So let me get to that.

I did some work on the sleigh. I was getting a little stuck with how I wanted to proceed so I did some perusing online for reference pics. From there I decided on a little different look for the front bench. It’s got a little more flair. Now I need to decide what to do for the back area.

For the business card I have been working on, I made some additional adjustments. The client and I did a review of it and there are a few more changes to be made, both for the business card and for the artwork. So I have it in my queue to get done. I’m pretty close with it so, a little excited to get it completed.

In addition to getting a post about the TKD Guy Project up, and more rigging tutorials watched, I did more work on the modeling. I need some chairs in the lobby area and after some thought, I decided to use a folding chair. I will be posting more about it. For now I’ll say, it turns out to be a little more challenging than I thought. There were a fewTKD_Guy_04092015g false starts. Even so, I am really happy with the way it is shaping up and looking forward to getting it all done. Here’s a little sneak peak of how it’s progressing.

I’ve been trying to get some type of sketch into a sketchbook each day or at least every other day. I think it’s a good habit to have. I admire the people that do this. Especially some of the ones that their daily sketch is what I consider a finished work.

That’s the week. I wish I had more pictures for you this week. But the end of the week sort of sneaked up on me. Who knows, maybe I will have some sketchbook pictures to include with the next weekly update.

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Making Targets

Posted on April 7, 2015 by SusanG

I am still figuring out how to go about setting up the Mannequin for animating it but I know, I need something for it to kick. Yes, in Taekwondo class you do spend a lot of time practicing your kicks by kicking at air. However, you also get to kick targets. Small targets and big targets. I have a big target sitting in the other room so that is what I decided would be the next thing to model.

The big targets are like holding a shield for someone to kick so that they don’t hurt you. That doesn’t mean you might not still fall over, it just means they probably won’t leave a bruise. Because of the how it is used there are several handles on the back side of it. This is where the main modeling will be since it is otherwise a big rectangle shaped box of foam. So the back is where I’ll focus.

I created a box off to the side from what is already in my scene so that the other items wouldn’t get in the way and I didn’t have to freeze or hide things. With my box created, before I made it an editable poly I adjusted the dimensions of it so that they roughly match the target I have. With it’s size set, I made it an editable poly and set about adding edge loops where I was going to have straps and handles.

I used the extrude tool a lot. I selected the faces that I wanted to raise and then used the extrude to create the additional geometry to make them stand up off the surface. I could have just moved the faces but that would have caused the surface to deform and create more of a hill type of look instead of looking like a strap across the surface that has sides. The extrude takes the faces and moves them and creates the sides so that the rest of the surface stays in one place. So it adds the side faces as well as moving the top faces.Examp_ExtrudeFace_MoveFace

Here’s and example. On the left in this picture I selected a face and I moved it up from the surface. See how it makes it a hill or a bump in the surface. On the right I selected a face and I extruded it. See how it is more like something sitting on top and how it has the extra faces on the sides.

So I did a lot of extruding to get what I wanted for creating this target. When It came to the handles I had to extrude the face twice because I wanted to create the opening between the handle and the rest of the target. I added some extra edge loops and then I was able to delete the side faces that were closest to the target part and leave the rest to create the handle. Then I had to go in and close up the hole it created in the target and the back of the handle. That was a little tricky because they are so close together. I did this same process for all four handles around the outside. TKD_Guy_03292015aThose are the ones you grip with your hands and they have and additional plastic covering around them.

I added the plastic grips by creating a cylinder and scaling it so that it just fit around the handle but the handle breaks through the inside surface of the cylinder, at the moment. I did it this way because I will be going back and softening and deforming most of the handles and even reshaping some of the target to make it look a little less like a brick and a little more like a hunk of foam that gets beat on. The grips aren’t really perfectly round so I did a little scaling or squishing to take some of the perfect roundness away. Once I created the first grip I copied it and then adjusted it as needed,scaled or rotated mostly.

All of that was the easier part of creating this target. There are two more straps in the middle that need to be created. I’ll do that next. For now, here’s that the back of one of these big targets looks like.IMG_0408

 

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Back to Work on the TKD Project Environment

Posted on April 3, 2015 by SusanG

While I figure out what to do with the Mannequin, now that I’ve got it created, it’s time to get back the environment in which it will live, mostly. There are plenty more pieces to create and I might as well get to work.

Here’s a quick reminder of where I left off.

TKD_Guy_01222015a

I’ve decided to expand this a bit so I can start to create a lobby, an office area and some additional rooms for changing or storage. They won’t be very relevant I don’t think but I’llTKD_Guy_03282015a create the base for them now while there is less in the scene to deal with. So I made the ground larger and I extended a couple of the walls. I also cut an outside window into one of the walls.

I know I need a place to hang our hand targets. These are targets that are easily held in one hand. The generally have a strap on the handle end and we tend to hang ours from some pegs. So I created a shelf with some pegs sticking out. This wasn’t terribly difficult to create. The only thing I did that is different than much of the other work I have been doing is that I made better use of the extrude tool for the shelf. I added and edge loop and then extruded one of the faces that it created. I added some cylinders for the pegs and made sure I have some additional cap segments to work with.

TKD_Guy_03282015c

Staying organized is going to be key for this scene and on this project. I thought I’d show you what sort of challenge it is going to be by showing you the Inventory list so far.InventoryList

 

I also have the Scene Explorer – Layer Explorer to show you how I’m hoping to organize things. You can see the names of the objects in the scene and what layer I have put them on. You can also see some items that start with grp. This is I am using as shorthand for Group. I’ve grouped some items together for ease of placement, applying materials, among other things that I may need, like hiding them from view or freezing them so I don’t select them.SceneLayerExplorer

So here’s what the shelf looks like on the wall. It seems a little small at the moment, but since I grouped all the pegs with the shelf it should be easy to scale it if I need to.TKD_Guy_03282015d

I’ll need to make some targets for the studio. I think I’ll work on that next. I need big two handed targets and the smaller hand targets. Stay tuned.

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