Weekly Update – March 20, 2015

Posted on March 20, 2015 by SusanG

Another week. I never seem to get as much done as I plan on. There is always so much to do. I keep running out of day.

I got to spend some time working on that crane in Zbrush. Still using the move brush along with the clay build up brush with the smoothing brush to get the shape down and start to add details. I really wanted to get the face and beak figured out. I figured if I could Crane_03152015bget that part done then I would start to work on the rest of the bird. I did have to do a little more fiddling around the eyes as well. It took a little work for me to get some good definition there. For the eyeball part I used the clay build up brush but to get the definition around it I used the dam standard brush. I also used the standard brush to get the nostril parts of the beak.

Once I had the face detailed better I started working on the rest of the body. I used the move brush to better shape the body and the neck. I discovered as I was working on the model that it was a little on the skinny side so using the move brush I fleshed it all out a bit better. Then I used the clay build up to start to get some feather definition on the neck and body. I found using the clay build up to get a good streaky like look and then going back over it all with a light weight smoothing brush got me a nice look like feathers.

Crane_03152015aJust looking at the model from the side view doesn’t really do it justice so far so I took an image of it from a bit of an angle. As you can see, I’m starting to get some detail on the body and even a little on the legs. I think the next part I will be working on will be the legs. I haven’t really touched them yet.

Crane_03152015c

So that was what I got done at the weekend.

I got started working on the refinement of the shapes for the mannequin in the TKD Guy project. That’s coming along well. I found that my height wasn’t quite right so I’m making adjustments to that as I work on refining it. I’ll have something about that up soon. Hopefully sooner than I got the info about working on the hand posted.

I got started on reviewing some tutorials on rigging in 3DS Max so that when I have the mannequin ready I should be able to get started on at least adding the bones.

I’ve been thinking I might need or want to stretch some of my artistic muscles and try some new subjects as well as styles. I know it will help a lot with the modeling. It could also be fun. So, since the movie Frozen has been on cable TV a few times recently, and I finally opened the Blue-Ray I got of it not long after it was available, I got intrigued with the idea of trying to draw some animated characters. I found a small picture of Elsa on a disc in my movie box and decided to give it a try. It’s a pose of her with a mischievous look on her face. Typically when drawing people I draw pretty straight on portraits. So there
is a bit of a challenge in the angle of her face. I also don’t usually draw much below the collar bone. But to create a render of this and just stop at the collar would really leave out so much of the story. The pose along with her expression are what make it a fun shot. So I got out my sketchbook and a pencil and gave it a try.IMG_0380

I think I did ok with the pose. But the eyes gave me some trouble. Which is a little unusual because when I draw regular portraits, that’s the part that I tend to nail. Still I was a happy an surprised at how it turned out. Of course when something’s not right it will bug me and I will work on it in my head and keep poking at it to get it right. That happened with this. But I got tired of erasing parts of the eye and redrawing because it seemed like the pencil kept falling into the same ruts on the paper. So I decided to see what would happen when I put it in Photoshop.

I opened the pencil sketch in Photoshop and set it as a bottom layer. I dropped another layer on top of it and started drawing on that. I sketched the eyes in as they were. And then started to get the outline of the rest of the image. I have to say, I’m not sure I would have been so brave to try it if I didn’t have my Cintiq. It makes it so much easier to get my cursor exactly where I want it. I’m still getting the feel for it. But working on this image of Elsa from Frozen has given me a lot of opportunity to get more comfortable with it. I’m still struggling with getting the blending just right. It’s not at all like smudging the graphite of a pencil. Not the smudge tool really doesn’t work the same. I think it should but it doesn’t. Still, I did use the smudge tool along with the blend brush.ElsaFromSketch

As you can see. I didn’t solve the problem with the eyes with the Photoshop drawing. In spite of that, I’m still pleased with how it turned out, at least most of it. I’m not sure I expected it to be as successful an endeavor as it is. I really like what I was able to do with finishing up the hand and the hair. I like the way that looks.

But the eyes still bug me. So I made a copy and tried again. I adjusted the angle of the eyes. This is the cool thing about Photoshop. I didn’t have to erase the eyes and redraw them. I marquee selected first one and rotated it a little and then the other and rotated it a little, and moved it over a little. Then I just had to go back and touch up around it. It’s getting closer. I’m not sure it’s quite there yet. But it’s closer.

ElsaFromSketch_2

I have a few other things I think I’m ready to start working on so hopefully I’ll have more pictures for you next week.

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And Now There is a Hand

Posted on March 20, 2015 by SusanG

I finally figured out how I would make the hand for the Mannequin. It took me a while to decide how to approach it. I considered using a cylinder with more segments on the end caps but I was still going to have to deal with the part that would need to be made a bit flat but concaved and the cylinder would have the sharp edge to to deal with. So I used a sphere.

Of course the one end had to be flattened, if not made a little Mannequin_03112015cconcave to work with the wrist sphere. That was fairly easy since I’ve been doing that part pretty regularly. I selected the center point on that end and used the soft select tool to impact the points in a graduated fashion. Though, now, as I look at my larger Mannikin for reference, I realize I would have been better of to deform the sphere first so that it was more oblong. I’m not starting over so I’ll just stick with what I have and make adjustments as needed.

Mannequin_03112015dTo get that nice angle-ish shape, I had to do quite a bit of minute adjusting. MOstly of points. I tried selecting a larger area and transforming it but that didn’t get it right. I even tried that with the soft select tool. I was able to make some adjustment that way. Just not enough and not really smooth enough. So a lot of fiddly bits again. I did find that it helped to isolate that particular component and to view it in wire frame. The wire frame view let me see the points and edges better so I could get it all more smoothly aligned.

Here you can see the part of the hand sphere that I adjusted. It’s not totally flat like my reference Mannikin. However, I will be animating them so it may beMannequin_03112015e better this way. I will also be refining everything soon so I may smooth that side out and even flatten it more.

I added a reference column of heads so I could get the height right. I had noticed that I might be a little off. So I copied the head shape over to the side and then stacked eight of them. When I did this I noticed that I was right and I was off. I knew that the pelvis component was a too short so I moved the all the components from the pelvis up, including the pelvis, so that the top of the head was even with the top of the stack. Of course that left a gap between the pelvis and the hip components. I’m going to have to fix that.

Next up I start refining the shapes. Oh, and I should probably work on getting the height and distances cleaned up while I refine everything. I think the Head will be fine but I know as I move into the chest and waist and so forth that I will need to make some changes.

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Weekly Update – March 12, 2015

Posted on March 12, 2015 by SusanG

It’s been a busy week in general so I haven’t gotten as much time to work on projects as I would like. And I have this awesome new tool that I am still learning and getting used to and just want more time with it. It’s very frustrating. It’s like not being able to wear your shiny new roller skates in the shower. Oh come on, you know what I mean. There was that one cool thing you got as a kid and you wanted to wear it everywhere. Yeah, it’s that sort of thing.

And on to the artistic endeavors of the week.

The Pumpkin picture I’ve been working on got another layer of color for the background. The lovely wood texture was competing with the coolness of the stippling technique on the pumpkin. So I darkened and greyed out the wood a bit more and it’s starting to make the pumpkin pop. I will wait a day or two before I decide if it’s done or if it needs another layer. It’s getting close though. Sorry, no picture for the moment.

Saturday, I finally got to spend some time using my new Cintiq in Zbrush. I decided that a better way to really get better at Zbrush was to try creating things from reference. It keeps me from cheating and forces me to really learn how to make something specific in Zbrush. For me, if I make it from my imagination, while that’s a cool thing, I have room to decide that I meant for it to be whatever it turns out to be. This way, I mean for it to be, and if it’s not, then I have to fix it.

So I chose a photo of a crane that either myself or one of my parents took. I used it many years ago as reference for a pencil drawing I did as well as a pastel drawing. As I thought of sculpting this crane in Zbrush I thought of using zspheres to draw out the general shape instead of doing hat I usually do and starting from a sphere. So I tried the zspheres.

I did several things wrong with the zspheres starting with not getting myself properly aligned in the view port so that using symmetry was not possible. I know I could have rotated the entire object but at that point I had run out of enthusiasm for the technique. But I still want to make this crane. So back to the old technique. I’ll start with a sphere.

I put a big ol’ sphere on the screen and hit the edit button and made it a poly and got to work. The primary brush I used was the move brush. I pulled out the the tail and the neck, and the start of the legs. The polys were all starting to stretch badly. So I decided to try the Crane_03072015aZremesher. The end of last week I had a chance to read a few reviews of the new release of Zbrush, 4R7 and they raved about the rework of the zremesher tool. Zremesher 2.0 is awesome. I so agree. I had all my polygons streched and ugly and I hit that button and they were all pretty again. Now I was able to stretch things out some more and it would
break.

This was looking good. I was really pleased, if a little shocked. I have struggled a bit to really get comfortable with Zbrush so to have it starting to look like what I intend is really something great for me. I thought about stopping at the point where the crane has no legs but decided I would go ahead and try to get the legs in for the poor bird before calling it good and going off and doing chores. They are a little skinny, but the bird does have skinny legs.Crane_03072015b

Crane_03102015a

And that’s how I left it for a few days. I got back to it around Tuesday and started on the head. The shape wasn’t quite right so a little more move brush and that helped. I used it on the top and on the sides. I needed the top of the head to be a little flatter with a bit of a slope and the part of the face where the beak attaches needed to be puffed out a little. And the just under the chin area needed a little adjusting. And time to add the eyes. While you only see the one side in these pictures, I was using symmetry so both eyes got created. It took some work to get the ridge on the head above the eye just right. But I managed I think. For now it’s working. For this I used a combination of the standard brush for a bit and the clay build up brush, and of course the smoothing brush.

I think it’s starting to develop a little personality.

Crane_03102015b

Obviously there is still a lot of work to do to complete the crane. But I think I’ve got a pretty good start.

I also started working on some pieces and ideas for this year’s Holiday card. I know, it’s nine months away. But really, if I start now I might get it sent out earlier than the 23rd of December this year. I might even get it done early enough to have it printed. I think that would be cool.

Even as busy as this week was, I was finally able to get back to the Mannequin for the TKD project. I got the hand object modeled and added some reference for height. I’ll be posting all about that soon.

And the big news for the week is that I’ve finally decided to take the plunge and create a business doing art. I filed for my LLC and had it approved this week. I will be setting up a site for it and even hope to add a gallery of some of the projects as well as other art to come. The name of the company is: SusanG Productions L.L.C.. I’ll provide more information once I get the website up and ready for visitors.

So that’s my week. As always, I’m hoping to get more things done or worked on this next week. I have a list of things that I need to get done soon and then there is the list of all those other things I want to make. So there is never a lack of things to work on, the challenge is deciding which to work on next.

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The Mannequin Has an Arm

Posted on March 8, 2015 by SusanG

With the mannequin having legs I could finally start on the arms. Once the arms and hands are done the middle tip of the fingers should end at about mid thigh. So it helps to have the legs completed. Or roughly completed.

Creating the arms is much like creating the legs, however, first, I wanted a depression in the upper part of the torso where the shoulder joint fits. To do this I selected the edges of a face and tried to get the matching edges on the other side. I tried the transform tool to scale them in towards each other just a little. I did some individual tweaking of the location of the face as well. And a little use of the soft select tool.

For the shoulder joint, I created a sphere and then squished it a little. I didn’t want it perfectly round I wanted a bit more of an oblong with the same radius at each end, so not egg shape but not completely spherical like the rest of the joints. Once I had the joint sphere shaped I shifted it into place at the impression created for that joint.

As I said, creating the arms was much the same as creating the legs. I created the upper arm like I did the thighs and lower legs by creating a new cylinder with sections on the caps, because, as with the components of the legs, the cylinder that I had originally placed Mannequin_02182015afor the upper arm, had no sections on the ends and I wasn’t able to create the indention that I wanted for the elbow joint or the shoulder joint. Once that was created and shaped, I copied the upper arm to make the fore arm. I figured I already the indentations created so by copying the upper arm and scaling the copy so that it fit for the fore arm I could work a little smarter. I did have to scale each end a little on its own as the scale translation wasn’t exact for what I needed for the fore arm. At this point the only thing left was to add the sphere for the wrist joint. Well and the hand but I’ll get to that a little later. The wrist was nothing difficult, it was just a sphere, scaled to size.

Mannequin_02182015c

 

This shot is a bit of a close up of the arm. You can see a little of the deform of the shoulder joint and that it’s not a true sphere.

 

 

 

Mannequin_02182015d

 

 

Here’s another angle of the body and the arm.

 

 

 

 

Mannequin_02182015g

 

 

In this side view you can see that I haven’t really differentiated the front to back in anything except the feet. I will need to do that since I want the back to be flat. Not yet though, that’s something for the next level of refinement.

 

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A Weekly Type Update – March 4, 2015

Posted on March 4, 2015 by SusanG

I’m thinking I may need to start posting weekly updates. It seems there are some weeks that much of my time is spent learning some new tool or technique and so I don’t have a lot of project progress to post about. That has certainly been the case this week. There has been some really fun stuff happen around here and I’m just chasing one squirrel after another. Fortunately, they all seem to be going in roughly the same direction.

A couple of the projects I have in mind to work on will make use of one of the many game engines that are available to, what else, make games. There are a handful that are really well known by some of the game enthusiast, players, that is. And then there are others that I suspect mostly developers know about. I’ve been researching these for a while and sort of waiting before I jump in since most of them have had some sort of license fee or subscription fee and some sort of royalty as well. The subscription costs of 3 of the bigger engines has come down over this last year and on Monday of this week a couple of them came down significantly, including the engine that I have finally decided to try to learn.

I had finally decided I was going to go ahead and sign up for the roughly $20 a month subscription for the Unreal Engine. The royalty of 5% wasn’t going to be a big deal for a while. So I was all set and ready to take the plunge this week. Then Monday afternoon I read the lovely news that the subscription fee has been dropped and the only cost is the 5% royalty. Awesome!

The end of last week had me putting in my order for a Wacom Cintiq 22HD Touch. And then spending the weekend all a quiver in anticipation of such an awesome new tool. Anticipation that was heightened Friday afternoon when I received an email from UPS notifying me that a signature would be required for delivery of said awesome tool. Oh, and that it should arrive on Tuesday. I have a really cool manager at my “day job” and I was allowed to work from home that day so that I could be available to provide the required
signature. The timing of the UPS driver could not have been much better. He dropped off my Cintiq 15 minutes before I was to finish work.

Awesome cool Cintiq arrived and once it was assembled I had to test it out. Ok. First I spent nearly two hours deciding which of my monitors I was going to give up in favor of the Cintiq and then I had to decide which side of the desk it was going to sit on. The short answer to that is that even though I am right handed I put it on the left and kept the monitor on the right. I did have to dig out the desk though as it had stacked up with a variety of project notes.

The first program I decided to test it with was Photoshop. I use this mostly for painting in it. So I pulled it up and shifted the program to the Cintiq and got to sketching. I used the brush tool and chose a pencil style brush with a black swatch. I started out pretty soft. But I got what I was hoping for. Better control of the brush and where it is hitting the page so that when I pick it up and move it, I know I’m putting it back down where I intend. It’s much faster since I don’t have to think as hard about it. I also used the blend brush with a Doodle_030320154% mix and not very saturated. This got me a nice blender with little extra. I did have to clean it a couple of times. I found that using a white swatch with this was really nice as it kept the blend from getting too dark. So here’s my first sketch using my new Cintiq.

I was so good. I did not stay up to 2:00am playing with the Cintiq. I did go to bed at a semi-reasonable hour and I even went to my “day job” today. But tonight I decided it was time to test out the Cintiq with Zbrush. That was fun. It works like a champ. It took me a little to identify what the side controls would Doodle_z03042015do in Zbrush. Only because I was too lazy to pull up the configuration to find out. I like the side controls a lot. My hand is already there and for the sculpting process it lessens the need to have one hand on the keyboard. As an aside, I love the control bar on the back in Photoshop as well where it acts as the zoom tool. Way awesome. So I messed around in Zbrush for a couple of hours tonight. Here is what I came up with. It’s made from a default sphere using mostly the move brush, the standard brush, the clay build up, and the smooth. It has be subdivided a couple of times but I haven’t re-topologized it so there is some stretching still. I kind of like it. I may go back to it later and develop it more.

And one other thing for this week. You might remember my Pumpkin project from back around Thanksgiving and early December when I got in that package of inks. Well I finally got that project finished. Here IMG_0376smis a shot of it almost complete. The Pumpkin is done in acrylic inks in the stippling style and the background is done with Prismacolor pencils.

So that’s the week so far. I have more done on the Mannequin and now that I’ve got an idea of how to model the next part I hope to have an update or two on that soon.

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