Weekly Update – April 23, 2015

Posted on April 23, 2015 by SusanG

Another week nearly complete. Any other week and I would be lamenting the speed with which it passed. This week is a little different as I will be on vacation from my day job next week and I am very much looking forward to the opportunity to work on other things. At the moment my plans for the time include some seasonal maintenance on my home, and breakfast or brunch with a friend, and of course lots of time at the computer working on the TKD Guy project and anything else that strikes me.

I did make progress on the TKD Guy project this week. I completed the modeling work on the folding chair for the lobby. It was quite involved and so will take a couple more posts to tell you all about it. I still want it setup so that I can animate it being opened and closed easily. I started testing out how to create that rig and while I made some progress with figuring out what I need to do, I also discovered that I need to compensate for some annoying behavior. So I’m going back to the tutorials to find the one that tells about what to do for it.

With the modeling on the chair finished I decided I wanted a little break from the project and spent some time working on the dolphin sculpt in ZBrush. I think I have fixed the problem I was having with the width of the body. In the process I figured out that I had the eye in the wrong spot. I thought I had used symmetry when creating that eye and when I was looking to correct it I discovered, I didn’t. Guess it’s good I decided to fix it. This time I used symmetry and have an eye on each side. I’m still working on getting the head shape just right, along with the nose. So still some work to do but here it is now.Dolphin_04192015b

I worked a bit on the sleigh project as well. I want to add some thickness to the runners so I started on that. I made good progress and then decided to add a section that will be like a metal foot on the bottom of the runner. I got a good way to completing that and ran out of day. Running out of day is a constant problem for me. I don’t have any pictures of the changes to the sleigh. I forgot to take them before I shut down.

I’ve got a few items bouncing around in my head that will need to be let out soon. A couple will make it to the sketchbook and one will probably be a side creation in 3DS Max or ZBrush. I did manage to get a couple of other things out of my head and into a sketchbook this week.

DSCN0241_small  DSCN0233_smallDSCN0237_small

I saw a trailer for an animation that will be premiering at the Cannes Film Festival this year. It will be screening out of competition. It looks fabulous. It’s a combination of stop motion animation and CG animation. It’s called ‘Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince)’ from Mark Osborne. It’s due to be released in July in France but there is no U.S. release date yet. That has me a little disappointed. I would really like to see it.

I’m also looking forward to Pixar’s ‘Inside Out’. It is also premiering at Cannes, screening out of competition. It’s due for U.S. Release in June. I can’t wait.

I’m still working on the rigging tutorials but have decided to work along so I have a better feel and understanding of it. Just watching the tutorials is fine but I find that actually doing what they are showing as they show it, or just after, is more effective for me, for learning. And the rigging tutorials are a big part of what I will be working on next week.

And there we have it.

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The Lobby Needs Seating

Posted on April 21, 2015 by SusanG

I’m not quite ready to figure out how I’m going to model the small hand held target so I
decided it was time to work on seating for the lobby. Where I take Taekwondo we have a
variety of chairs some with padding and some without. I could do that. Or, I could just
make a folding chair and use several of that. Not just any folding chair though. I wanted
the basic metal one. You know, the one that, you are glad to have some place to sit but
hopefully you won’t be there long.

Something like this that I found on an Office Depot website.

I didn’t figure on how much of a challenge it was going to be to model. And where to start.
Well, with the frame. The frame for the back of the chair looks like a tube of metal so
that’s what I started with first. Not the best choice. And I figured that out pretty quick
but it meant that I had to stop and rethink what I was trying to do. I finally decided on
using cylinders and sections of a torus. I set the torus to the same number of segements as
the cylinders so that I could connect the ends. I then only created a quarter of the torus.
I copied it and rotated it and then I had the corners. Cylinders down each side and one
across the top gave me the components I needed to create the frame for the back of the
chair. I discovered on another project that if I was going to connect two components then I
had to make sure there was no face in between them. So I deleted the end faces on the
cylinder ends that were connecting to the torus sections. Then I attached them and I was
able to move them right up close and weld the points. Nice. So after a false start, I was TKD_Guy_04082015a
making progress and I was off and running on the frame. Mostly. I was able to use the frame from the back and select part of the top of it and copy just that part so that I could make the brace for the bottom part of that frame.

At this point I had the basics for the brace, I just needed to make some adjustments refine it. The extenders needed to be squished instead of completely round so I worked on that mostly using the soft select tool and some scaling. I did have to do some point or vertices manipulation to clean up the look. It was a bit rough. The whole piece had to be scaled in a little so that it would fit properly between the legs of the frame. And of course setting just the right height for it was important. I still had a seat to fit in there and those little caps to go on the bottom of the feet.

With the main frame created, creating the frame that would be the back legs was pretty
easy. What would have been easier is, after I attached the bottom brace to the frame I
selected the bottom part of the frame and made a copy of it. This would have given me the
right width of the frame and the bottom brace, without a lot of extra work. I didn’t do
that. I created a new cylinder at the height I thought I needed and then made a copy of
that so at least they were the same height. I then made a copy of the bottom brace and
moved it in between the two new cylinders. I made a little mistake in creating the
TKD_Guy_04082015bcylinders that I would discover much later. Anyway, I adjusted the spacing of the cylinders and the brace so that they were nice and tight and looked just right. When I copied the brace, I made sure not to adjust it’s location along the Z axis so that it would be at the right height. That saved a little frustration. At this point, I needed the second brace for that frame set so I copied the one that I had in place and transformed it’s position only along the Z axis this time and that was that. And easy.

I think that was the last easy part on this chair.

Now it needs the back rest part, a seat, the brackets, some bolts, end caps for the feet
and such. Just a few more bits to go.

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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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