Before I get into this post, I would like to make a random, nothing to do with the topic observation. And that is that someone needs to get Mother Nature a Snickers Bar. She’s just not herself lately.
In spite of the unpleasant weather that required a bit of re-organization of my plans and schedule for last week, I made progress on two of my projects.
One of the progressed projects was the Alien Greezbly. In addition to having an opportunity to work more on thinning out the mesh, there have been a couple of other developments. I did get a nice chunk of thinning done as you can see here.
And while I was
working on that I started to realize and accept that since I want to animate this character and I still have all this thinning to do, that I may find it more efficient to use the ZBrush model as reference and try to re-create the model in 3ds Max, or Maya. I’ll get to the question that you just asked, ‘Why Maya?’ in a bit, sort of. The other thing that developed has to do with Greezbly’s name. I have recently tripped over and tangled my tongue considerably with some German words I was trying to repeat, and not long after that someone pointed out that they were having a bit of trouble saying Greezbly. So perhaps this little Alien needs a name change or tweak. I thought about Greezby but I think I’ve heard that used recently for some other character. I kind of like Greezb. It’s not as long and you don’t trip over the ‘ly’ at the end. What do you think? Let me know on Twitter or Google+.
The re-rigging of Sticks is moving forward. Not only am I caught up to where I was when I started over, I am a little past that. I’ve done a couple of things different that might be making this go a little smoother. Probably the most important thing is, staying on it, keeping it moving ahead and not getting side-tracked. The other thing I did was small but seems to help. Originally, when I started on Sticks I had him oriented so that to look him in the face you had to use the left side view. The tutorial I have been following has the character oriented to to look at it’s face you have to use the back view. I re-oriented Sticks
so I use the back view and it helps some. At least I have no confusion as to which axis I need to mirror across. For some reason, doing this also made using the asterisk for the FK controls work better. I even had some of the same flipping responses as the tutorial.
I still have the scaling issue with the arm bones when scaling from the global control. Interestingly, when I tried the project file for that step, it has a similar problem, apparently I missed it before. I suspect it has something to do with locking the scale attribute on some of the controls. However, for the moment, I’m not going to worry about it. I’ll just move on.
I started looking ahead to some of the next steps, and even steps after that. The next most immediate steps are setting up the finger controls. Based on the length of the tutorials it’s probably going to take about 1 to 2 hours, or most likely somewhere in between, to finish that up. Then there is some rig cleanup before skinning. After the skinning comes the animating part. I’m really looking forward to that part but I’m not entirely sure how to proceed. So I started looking for some tutorials or books on animating in 3DS Max. I didn’t find a lot of resources for it. Which brought me to my other realization for the week, or at least for this post.
The difference in the amount of resources, in the places I looked, for animating in 3DS Max versus in Maya is quite noticeable. There is much more available for Maya than for 3DS Max. That isn’t the realization. The realization is that I am going to have to learn Maya much sooner than I expected, or planned.
At this point I won’t be starting over on Sticks again. I’m too close to being able to use him as I want and I expect a bit of a learning curve in Maya. Though perhaps not as steep as it looked a couple of releases ago. I will finish rigging and animating Sticks, as best I can, in 3DS Max and will work with him there until I’m comfortable enough in Maya to import him there, if I need to.
In the mean time I will start learning Maya. Once I’m comfortable with modeling in Maya I should be ready to tackle some of the resources for learning to animate in it. It’s not that I can’t animate in 3DS Max. I expect I will be able to just fine once I have a better understanding of animating in a 3d computer graphics program of some variety in general. And since it looks like the majority of the resources for learning that are for Maya, I think I’m going to need to make a switch. For a little while.
It’s not a bad thing. A little disappointing. But not bad. It will give me a chance and reason to learn Maya. Though the timing may not be to my preference. Learning to use Maya has been on my to do list. I just haven’t gotten started on it. Fortunately, I found at least one tool that I think will make learning it a little easier than the last time I tried. And I’ve had a little, and expect to have more, experience with Unreal Engine which uses either the same or similar navigation controls. That could be really helpful. There were all sorts of additions and changes to Maya 2016 that I think I might like. And this will give me a reason to try some of them out. And while I could be really frustrated with all the time I’ve spent working in 3DS Max only to figure this out now, I’m not. I chose to start in 3DS Max because it was more familiar and I could jump in and do stuff right out of the gate. I didn’t have that experience with Maya when I first tried it, nor with Blender for that matter. Now that I’ve had a chance to get re-acquainted with 3d modeling and the concepts and tools and terminology. I expect it will be translatable and you’ll be seeing renders from Maya sooner rather than later. Hey! I might even give Renderman a try since I can download a free non-commercial license.
And that’s my realizations and progress for this week. I wouldn’t be surprised to come to some other plan shattering conclusion in the next week. You might want to check back to find out if I do, or at least to see the progress on Sticks.