I’m going to try to keep this fairly quick so I can get back to playing with my toys. No not the Lego bricks. Though I have some of those to work on too. Nope. I had a whim floating around in my head and I decided to do something about it.
I was thinking it would be fun to do a scene with Sticks and my Snowman and make it something with a bit of Christmas or Winter feel to it. Of course, since they are both in 3DS Max I went back to that to work on this. I’m not giving up on Maya. I was just too lazy to try to export everything in a format that it would work in Maya. I’ll probably be doing it at some point though. For now, I decided to stay in 3DS Max.
I started with a scene that had Sticks already rigged, and apparently with some animation. I saved it as a new file and then imported and merged the Snowman, the tree, and the Santa hat. Nice to have some toys to play with. From there I added a ground plane. Because Sticks was already in the scene, all his materials were there but I decided to change them. I didn’t want him all dark looking for a holiday scene so I gave him a new look. Then I had to figure out what to do about the Snowman since I pulled him with no materials assigned. He turned out to be pretty easy. And a little fun. This way he doesn’t look exactly as he does in some other scenes. It’s like a different set of clothes.
As you can see, I haven’t really done a lot of modeling with this. Just for the ground. At the moment, I’m not planning on much more modeling. I expect to put all the work into the animating. Yep. Animating. I’ve decided to try to make Sticks walk over and do something with the Snowman or maybe the Santa hat, or maybe both. It’s sort of a big thing. But as I’m just goofing around I’ll at least have some fun with it. I had to repose Sticks to a good starting pose and then I moved him to where I want him to start moving from. Then I started trying to animate the walk. I set a key frame and then moved to a different frame and made my first adjustments and set a key frame and moved to another frame and so on. I did this for about 4 key frames. Now I know that doesn’t sound like a lot but trust me I moved quite a few things each time. After I had a few key frames in place I wanted to see how it was looking. It was looking good except that he seemed to keep moving and doing more. Weird.
So remember I said I started with a scene of Sticks that had some animation in it? Yeah. I had to go find it and delete all the keys. I might have been able to delete it on each object that got changed by that would have taken a lot of clicks. So I found a graph or 
something of it and was able to delete all key frames. Of course that meant I lost the work I had just done. Oh well. I tried again. This time I didn’t get as far before I figured out that Sticks was floating above the ground. Since Sticks isn’t meant to be a Sorcerer in this scene, I had to delete all the key frames and then set Sticks with his feet on the ground. And here we are now. Ready to once again, start animating the scene.
Before I get back to animating this, I think I’m going to take a moment and put in a sky of some sort. And I may add a present or two and maybe an ornament as well. Oh. And lights. I’m thinking I want them all in the scene from the beginning instead of adding them later and hoping that they appear in every frame. Because, I’m not so sure they would.
One of the things I realized as I was playing with my toys is that, I don’t have that many toys to be playing with. I guess I need to get busy making more toys.
I’m going to go play now. Bye. See you later.