So Glad I’m Not Animating This

Posted on January 7, 2015 by SusanG

I’m getting close. The office model is nearly finished. Just a few more lamps to add. There is already a lot of stuff in this room it really doesn’t need anything else. But to get an accurate understanding of how bad it is and to make it better, I really need to put them in.

So off we go. Let’s add the two lights that are on the desk. They aren’t very big lights. They actually have a cone shaped lampshade on them and I considered creating the lamp in two or three parts to be more realisitic. That’s not really the point of this so I decided to go with s cylinder shape. I dropped in a cylinder with the right height and right diameter to represent them. Not a very difficult model.

Once the one lamp was in I decided it should have reasonable appropriate materials in relation to what it really looks like. The lampshade is a nice purple-ish color and the rest is a black metal. This is another reason that I thought about modeling the lamp in more than one piece. However, I learned a great trick with the Holiday Card project and this seemed a great opportunity to use it. It did take me a little bit to figure out how to use it again. The material id settings, though proved to be the best solution.

A bit better an explanation of what it took to use the material id and the selection id feature. First I selected my materials got them all setup the way I wanted. Then I assigned the materials to separate material id chanels. Then I went back to the cylinder and selected the faces that I wanted to have the lampshade material And under the Polygon: Material IDs I Set the ID. I did the same for the faces that I wanted to have the black metal material. I thought this would automatically assign the material. It didn’t show up. So using the Polygon: Material IDs section and chose the id I set the lamp Office2014_010615ashade to and then used the select id button. Then I went back to the material editor, selected the material I wanted and chose the assign to selection option. I had to do this for the other selection set as well. As you can see, it did let me get what I wanted.

I copied it so that I had the second lamp. As you can see though, it doesn’t really look like either lamp is emitting light. I turned off the other lights to verify. I was disappointed, I was really hoping that making that material a self illuminating material would take care of that. It didn’t so for each light I added an omni light in the middle at the height the bulb would be. Then I grouped each light with it’s lamp so that I can move them around easier.

This looks better. I know it’s a bit dark. It’s actually what the room looks like with just those two lights on.

Office2014_010615b

Wow. That one scene too almost 30 minutes to render. Holy cow. Of course with those lights and all the relective surfaces, there are a lot of Final Gather points to calculate.

Here’s another view of the room with all the lights on. This one took 48 minutes to render. With render times like that, I am so glad I am not animating a view of this room.

Office2014_010615c

And still two more lamps to go before moving things around. At least I know to go get coffee while I render those scenes.

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Let’s Get This Office Modeled.

Posted on January 2, 2015 by SusanG

After spending some time trying to work in my office the last couple of weeks, I’m ready to get it where it’s more functional. And now that I’ve finished up a couple of other projects, I’m diving back in to getting the office modeled.

Since I’m using stand-in shapes my furniture and other equipment in the office, there isn’t a lot of actual modeling to things. Though, there are some items that need a little modeling. Such as the chair and the monitors. All of which needed just a little work.

Office2014_1227a

The chair was created from 2 boxes. One box for the back and one for the seat. Then I made sure I had enough edge loops that I could line up all the edges. Then I removed any faces from each that would be touching when I went to attach the two objects. I’ve learned that trying to attach objects one face to another doesn’t work very well so my general solution is to remove those faces and then attach the objects. I did this. After the boxes were attached, I changed to wire frame mode and vertex selection so that I could weld the corresponding vertices to make the final object look seamless. With so many items starting to fill up the scene, I needed to be able to look at just what I was working on. I found the isolate selection option and the the end isolate option. These proved to be bit time savers as I didn’t have to keep hiding and un-hiding everything in the room, or even just the few
things that were in the way.

Office2014_1228b

I did pretty much the same thing with the monitors. The big difference being the placement of the two boxes to each other. I also made sure that they center point for each box was on the same x and y points. That helped to make sure it lined up nicely and correctly.

With the chair done and the monitors done it means I’ve finally finished off all the big furniture and have moved into creating the smaller items in the room. There was more computer equipment to account for, the keyboard, drawing tablet, the actual computer and all the equipment for my cable and cable modem and so on. So there were a lot of smaller items to model. Most of these items were just box shaped items. Though the trashcan was a cylinder. There was also the TV to model, which was handled the same as the monitors.

Everything was moved to it’s place as it was modeled. Otherwise the room would look much as it is likely to look when I start moving things around for real.Office2014_1228a

As you can see, I do have a lot of stuff in this room and most of it is on my desk.

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Wrapping up the Holiday Card 2014 Project

Posted on December 29, 2014 by SusanG

The Holiday Card 2014 is complete. I hope you enjoy it. I had fun with this one. Especially as I got towards the end and it all started coming together.

There were a couple of areas that required a lot of manual tweaking. They were areas where I couldn’t use large overall changes and I would have to move smaller bits such as edges and vertices one or two at a time to get the look and shape I wanted. I was able to find a shortcut or two that helped with all of that maunal tweaking.

Some of the shortcuts I was able to use that alleviated some of the work were things like creating only 4 palm leaves completely and then copying them and making some adjustments to make them a look a little different which added variety and yet not as much work. I was also able to short cut with the snow. Once I figured out how to do the snow I was then able to make a copy of the first one and then scale it to fit the next area on the tree, rotate it so a different view was facing forward on that level, and then make relatively minor adjustments to the shape.

The cool new thing that I figured out how to do could also be considered a shortcut. When I started to create the Santa’s hat I considered that I would have to do the main part of the hat in two pieces, the hat piece and the trim. I was able to figure out how to use just the one object and apply two materials to it so that I didn’t have to model those pieces individually and try to get them to fit together. That was a huge plus to me. And something
I will be using again.

There are many things I could have continued to add to this scene. The time constraint of wanting to have it ready for Christmas helped me to stay focused on the base theme and limit my additions, especially when I was able to see how much time I was actually getting to spend working on it. Given more time and better focus I might have added a few more things. Then again, there are a lot of parts of this scene that I can see using as a base to add to for another year.

I am really pleased with the way this came out. I was able to achieve the look and feel I envisioned. Cool!
Next…

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Holiday Card 2014

Posted on December 24, 2014 by SusanG

HolidayCard_2014

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Dressing up the Cactus

Posted on December 24, 2014 by SusanG

I’ve got the Christmas tree with snow, there are ornaments on the palm tree. Now, the cactus. I debated a bit on what to do here, more snow or a Santa’s hat. More snow would have been cute but visually boring, and I was a little over adding snow to this scene so I decided to go with the hat.

To make the Santa’s Hat I started with a cone with plenty of segments and for the height and also at the ends. I scaled it so it would fit just over the top of the cactus. Instead of using the ‘By Polygon’ selection though I chose to extrude using ‘Local Normal’ so that it was like adding thickness to the next to bottom row of polygons and make it look a bit like that fur edge around the hat. Of course when I added the turbosmooth modifier the
distinction was decreased quite a bit so a few edge loops were added to fix that. That way you can tell the hat from the trim.

That was the easy part. Well mostly. The fuzzy ball at the end was probably easier as that really only required proper sizing and location. Which weren’t too bad. Before I could do that though I had to get the hat just right. I knew I wanted the top to flop over and I sort of wanted the rest a bit squished in. However, I also wanted to get the project finished so I opted for minimal tweaking and shaping with the idea I can refine it as part of another project if I want.

I selected the very top end and deselected the extra edges I had lasso’d in and then I used the soft selection tool again so that I could rotate and adjust the hat end so that it looked a bit more relaxed and flopped over. I did some more minor and finer adjusting by decreasing the distance out that the soft selection tool was effective. This worked really well. I also used it to to a bit of squish or sag. Then I deformed the very end a little to look a little more relaxed and pointed. Then I added and moved the fuzzy ball into place.

So far so good, and no pictures yet.

With the hat modeled it was ready for texture. I found a really cool red velvet texture that I thought would work well so I use that and then I used another instance of it and removed the red bitmap from it and applied a white color to get the white trim. I had to adjust the scale of the bitmap so that it didn’t look clumpy. I had to do that for both the red and the white part of the trim. SO I’ve got my materials to apply but when I tried to apply it by polygon it didn’t work.

To get a material applied by polygon to an object required I set up material ID selections. So I selected the one set of polygons and then in the menu under material id’s I used the set id option and set one selection set to id channel 1. Then I selected the other set and set that selection set to chanel 2. Then I went into the material editor and assigned each of the materials to the correct material channel instead of applying them to the selected object and then they all showed up correctly. So while I wasn’t working on this project with the idea of adding to my skill set I still learned something new and very useful. I used the same white velvet material on the fuzzy ball on the hat. Then I grouped it all together so I could move it around as needed.HolidayCard_1221h

Looks pretty cool if I do say so.

One last thing before I take it to Photoshop to add my greeting. When I swapped the gold and green ornaments
around, I was asked if I could also maybe raise the ornament that was by the cactus up just a bit. Since there is
a palm leaf there just a little higher that I could hang the ornament off of I went ahead and moved it.

HolidayCard_1221i

Check back a bit later and I should have the final piece posted with the greeting.

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