Starting on the Office

Posted on November 9, 2014 by SusanG

It is time to get started on the Model My Home Office project. It has become even more compelling than it was when I initially conceived the project. And since I just spent a day and a half working from home and finding the current setup totally inefficient for including the additional work space occasionally required for my day job the need and desire to move things around is becoming ever more desperate.

It appears there is going to be a lot more outside the computer prep work needed for this project, or at least more time consuming prep work. And there will probably be some inside the computer prep work. I expected the outside the computer prep work, at least to some extent, I’m not sure about the in the computer stuff. Though I don’t think the in the computer work will be nearly as time consuming as the outside the computer work.

For in the computer I will need to set up my grid system and display both the horizontal and vertical. I’m not sure if I’m going to need it three sided yet or not. We’ll see.tapmeasure_sm

The outside the computer prep work involves getting the dimensions of the room. You try this by yourself. I don’t know about you, my tape measure doesn’t always cooperate. No, I don’t have some fancy electronic measuring device. Just an old fashioned one inch wide auto stop 25
foot tape measure.

 

Adding to getting the basic room dimensions there are the niggling bits of where the outlets are along the wall, where on the wall the door is and how much of that space is taken up by the trim around the door, and where the window is and so on. Honestly, all of this would be so much easier if the room were totally empty. I could get to everything and have just those dimensions as well as all the height dimensions noted in probably 2 hours. Alas, no. My room is full and the walls are basically covered with furniture. Just to get the basic floor dimensions I had to snake the tape under a desk and I had to go behind a door. It’s going to be a challenge.

All of that so far is just going to be to get the room itself modeled. I still have stuff in the room. I need to get the dimensions on those things, even if they are rough dimensions. I have a lot of stuff. This is going to take a while.

Of course, trying to model enough of this stuff to rearrange the office may cause me to rethink the necessity or functionality of some of what I have. Then again…maybe not.

So at least things are starting to see progress.

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The Christmas/Holiday Tree

Posted on November 4, 2014 by SusanG

For the Holiday Card I just naturally started with the pine tree version of the Christmas tree. For me I think it will help to define the whole look and feel so best to start with it.

I started with a cone. I added some edge loops so that I could scale those in to make the tiers. Then I added another set of edge loops just above the edge that was the over hang. Then I selected the polygons between the new loop and the very edge one and I extruded
them. I used the extrude -by polygons option to get them to separate and extrude along their own normals. Unfortunately, because of the angle coming off the cone they all pointed up. The nice thing though is because all those polygons were still selected I was able to just use the transform tool and move them down to where they look right.

xmastree_extrude

This works pretty good. Though at the moment it looks a lot like a small silver tinsel Christmas tree we had for years when I was growing up. Still the idea works. HolidayCard_1021d

I want it to have some variety to it so I tried rotating each level of branches just a bit so that they are off center from each other some. I think it helps as well.

Unfortunately, when I stepped away and didn’t get back to the project for a few days, I didn’t remember my spacing of where I was extruding my polygons from and I’ve now got things a bit more spaced out than I think I want, or at least, more than is consistent with
the first set of levels that I worked on.

HolidayCard_1026a

One of the things I did to add some variety to things was to resize, or scale the polygons at the end of each arm/branch that sticks out. By doing that it sort of reshapes them a bit and makes it more visually interesting.

Since I intend to smooth everything when I’m done, and possibly add some snow patches I though I’d have a look at what things look like with turbosmooth applied. The good news is that it’s going to achieve the look I am going for. It also points out that some of my level of branches are a bit flat. I want them to be a bit fuller like the fourth one from the top. HolidayCard_1026b

As you can see I’ve got a bit more basic shaping to do as well as some adjustments to relative spacing.

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The Holiday Card 2014 Project

Posted on October 30, 2014 by SusanG

I thought I would share a little about the idea of the Holiday card for 2014 before I get too far into it.

Over the years my family has lived a variety of places. We have also had a variety of trees designated as our Christmas or Holiday tree. We started out normal enough with your standard pine tree. Then there were times when the holiday season came around as we were hoping or planning to move the next year. In those years, as we looked forward to the landscape of a new place we tended to designate something from that landscape as our Holiday tree or Christmas tree.

Through the magic of streaming video I was watching a holiday episode of one of my favorite shows and the format it was done in inspired me to create a Holiday card in 3d art with a nod to the look of the animation of the holiday specials of my youth. Think the
original “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” and “Santa Clause is Coming to Town”.

So with an eye towards that particular style and a desire to pay homage to the creativeness and quirkiness of my family I decided to create a holiday card in 3D for this season. Not sure if I will animate it but I hope to make it a bit stylized and somewhat whimsical. And I hope to have it finished before the end of December.

So with that.

Check out the next post as I get started on it.

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Starting a New Project Nov/Dec 2014…

Posted on October 25, 2014 by SusanG

Or more like starting new projects. As in, yes, more than one.

I have so many ideas for things that I want to create and a few things that I need to create, and it is very difficult to decide what to work on next. Part of that is because some projects are going to take longer than others, some of it is because some projects are more timely.

For timely there are things that are seasonal, and while I might not get it ready before the season ends, the season itself puts me in the mood to work on it. For timely there are also things that are needed, for example, I have a need to re-arrange furniture in a room in my home. I can do what I always do which is use grid paper and cut out shapes and figure out if things will fit in certain spots. Or I can use 3ds Max and create a rough model and layout of the room and see how it will look. Then there are the projects that will take longer. They are projects I just want to do because I think they will be cool, and will give me an opportunity to learn to do something else I need to learn.

Choosing amongst them all is not easy. So this time I have decided that instead of working on one project at a time and only focusing on it, I will be working on three. Yes, three. I know this sounds a bit overreaching for someone very new to what I’m doing. However I
have a madness to my method. So let’s look at the projects I intend to work on.

The Holiday Card Project 2014. This is seasonal. I was going to do something for Halloween and it is so close now that it is just not reasonable. I will leave it in my list of projects so perhaps I will plan better for next year. Not only is it seasonal and timely, it
will give me an opportunity to work more with UV maps as well as learn some new modeling techniques and tricks. I hope to have it completed before the end of December. I hope.

The Model My Home Office Project. This is not going to be as detailed as it sounds, I don’t think. There is huge potential for scope creep with this one. However, I have a need or desire, to re-arrange the furniture in this room. There is a lot of furniture in the room and some very large pieces. I typically do this with grid paper before I start dismantling things and moving them around. Then when I do move things, sometimes the room feels off balance due to too many large things on one side or whatever. So I think a 3D rendering of the space will help. I will have the opportunity to work with making things the right sizes. Not just eyeballing things. If the bookshelf is 7 feet tall then it needs to be 7 feet or whatever measuring units I use. I may not model all the pieces exactly or even in anything more than a basic shape. I am looking to assess the volume and displacement of the objects in the room. And maybe lighting as this is a small issue as well.

The TKD Guy Project. This project is the one that I expect to take the longest. And it is the beginning of a much much larger project. I take Taekwondo, and I draw. I was looking at the little drawing mannequin I have, thinking, it would be kind of cool to demonstrate
Taekwondo moves with one of those manequins. It would be fun and sort of a cartoon like thing. So. I will create the mannequin in some form of Taekwondo uniform and create the studio and the required decor for the studio. This will give me a chance to work on the
modeling, using UV maps, lighting, rigging a character for animation, animating that character, and working with a camera or two. The length of the animation is not determined yet. And I have not decided what I want to demonstrate with this first segment.

I don’t expect to make visible progress on every project every week. Some weeks the progress will be in completing some tutorials on some component of what I’m doing such as rigging. Some weeks only one project will be updated and may show a lot of progress. Other weeks more than one project will get a bit of attention. At some point it may seem that one project has taken precedence over the others. This is a natural progression of things I think. Regardless of how things do progress, I will post about them and they will
each get their own section under projects so if you prefer to follow one more than the others you will be able to do so fairly easily.

This should be exciting.

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