This week I came up with solutions to things that were giving me trouble. And, there was a little frustration. Still those solutions have helped and could even get one project that I had considered putting on hold, back on the table.
I’ll start with the frustration. No, it wasn’t that I didn’t win the PowerBall this last week. It wasn’t even that of 3 tickets I purchased, I got only 1 number. It was Sticks. This project to get him rigged has been extremely exasperating. There has been more than one section that I have had to completely re-do. And now, one section I had to do 3 times. So fair is fair, I did expect I might have to re-do this last section, I just didn’t expect to have to do it a third time. No wonder I face working on him with trepidation .
I sat down to start on the next section, rigging the wrist, and was stepping through the testing bits, along with the tutorial, to see everything was working right. It wasn’t. I knew I might have an issue on the right side because of the FK bones not sitting exactly on top of the main bones. That wasn’t it. It turned out that the arm bones on that side, all of them, IK and FK were not properly connected to the shoulder bone. I poked around at the left side for a while to see if I could determine which bones, IK, FK or the main ones, were actually connected and if they were linked to the shoulder bone or constrained to it. About all I could tell for sure was that they weren’t linked.
I wasn’t entirely sure where I missed the step to make that connection and something else wasn’t working right, though now I don’t remember what it was. So I took a deep breath and deleted all my FK controls and the IK goal. Then I removed all the constraints on all the bones. I found I could do this by choosing the bone and the hierarchy panel and then the IK tab. There I found the constraints in a small window. I clicked on it and then the delete button below it. That’s when I figured out the connection to the shoulder was a constraint. I scanned back through the tutorials and found where I needed to start again and started watching. I think the step to link or rather constrain to the shoulder end nub was actually in the video step just before that. Anyway, I started working through the process again. I’m really good at changing the bone size in the script editor now…. $.width = 2, $.height = 2.
I got all the way back up to where I was ready to start working on the wrist rigging and the right side was fine now and most everything was working except… That weird bit where the FK bones weren’t lined up correctly on the right side? Now I had it on the left side. Argh. Since I knew this only started with the FK controls process I just deleted the FK controls on the left side and did that part again. I’m not sure what caused the problem for either side. But I couldn’t fix it on either side and had to start over. The only thing that comes to mind is that some how something odd happened in the step where I mirrored the first set of controls to the other side to set them up there. It shouldn’t have been the 
issue. But when I started the left side over the third time, and I couldn’t mirror the controls over because I had already frozen and locked their position controls, I just made the controls separate and everything seems to have worked out. I did make one change though. I didn’t like the asterisks that are used in the tutorial so I used a plus sign. I also moved the sliders up, out of the way a bit.
I will confess, as much as I needed to work on Sticks, that little episode sapped all my enthusiasm for working on Sticks for the week. I just couldn’t face him again. And, it was already the weekend. I hadn’t gotten much else worked on all week as the sudden change in the weather and temperature caught me off guard and I was so cold most of the week that I was too exhausted to work on anything. Quick confession here, I am a cold weather wimp. When I get cold, it’s very hard for me to recover without sleep. Still, I hated to make no better progress on any of my projects for the week than I had. So at 3 in the morning, as I was going to bed after falling asleep on the couch, I had the possible solutions to issues on 3 other projects spring into my head. And amazingly, I remembered them all.
First the minor issue of the color of the word Studio on the sign and making it stand out better against the dark background that it will have. I wanted a way to make it look a little like it was glowing or something. And then I remembered, I for some reason, have the Velvet Violet acrylic ink color. It’s a pearlescent color of violet. I decided it would at least make it look different and was a little lighter, sort of, and would make the letters stand out better. I don’t know if you can tell the difference here but the first one is the new color and the second is the color before.
The next solution was what to do about the painting of the guitar head stock. I want to finish it but I really don’t like the way the paint is working out. I decided I could try using a larger nib so I get larger dots and still use the ink, even over the paint, and that should give me back that control and make things look tighter. I tested that the ink would work on the paint and that the nib would work out too. The nice thing about this is that if I want the color to be even denser, I can switch to a smaller nib to fill in the areas in between the larger dots. It can really make a color area much more intense and interesting. So here’s my test of how I think it will look. I’ll be going over the lettering in ink again, I was going to need to in paint too. I should be able to get a really nice, vibrant and tight look.
And finally Greezbly. At one point as I was working on Greezbly, I thought about thinning out the mesh on the pants, which I will still do. Since it was not too dense, I could select an edge loop and then remove it. The problem was that it would leave all the vertices behind. This created a bunch of n-gons of an unacceptable number of sides and defeated the purpose of what I am trying to do. I had encountered the command where I could remove the edges and their vertices at the same time but I couldn’t remember it. So I decided to create a cube, give it lots of extra edge loops and try a few of the likely combinations and see which worked. That worked out nicely. It turns out, once I have the edge loop selected, if I hold the ctrl key while I press the remove button, the vertices go away with the extra edges and I get lovely quads instead of ugly n-gons. I’m on a PC when I do this not a Mac. I don’t know what the Mac key would be to do the same.
I took this newly figured out information and started working on Greezbly. Since I still have other clean up I’ve started on the pants, I decided to work on the shirt using this new method and see if it would help. The shirt mesh is really dense and a bit scary looking in that regards. A good thing to start thinning out. I tried a couple spots to see how it might work out and since that was successful, I tried a few more. Then I realized that the arms seemed even more dense than the body of the shirt so I decided to focus on one of those 
first. I would double click on an edge to get it to select the entire edge loop and then hold ctrl and press remove. This was moving along except that the edges are so small that sometimes that second click would miss and hit another edge so I wouldn’t get my loop and I’d have to try again, that is, if I hit the edge I wanted to, to begin with. Then I saw it. The loop button. Would it work? I’ll find out. Sure enough. I select a horizontal edge and press loop and I get the horizontal loop. I select a vertical edge and press loop and I get the vertical edge loop. Well that makes things a bit easier. I was able to really get on a roll with this and got a good chunk of one arm done. It turned out that some of the edge loops go all the way over to the other arm. This will be really helpful when I get to it. Some of the thinning already done will make it easier to find a starting spot. I did stop periodically to check that I hadn’t forgot to hold the ctrl key and didn’t have extra vertices.
There were a lot of edges just around the arm. At one point when I had a complete edge loop selected 3ds Max showed that I had 333 edges selected. That was just one loop around the arm. One of the vertical loops was 2458 and another 1168. Of course as I thinned things out those numbers went down. As you can see I’ve made good progress.
This is going to take a while. And I think I will need to go back through and do at least a second pass at thinning things out. I’m not sure it will be very interesting to see each week but, maybe a quick update as I go. For now here’s a wire frame view so you can see how dense the mesh is an the difference removing the few edge loops have already made.
Here you can see what it looks like in vertex selection mode and you can see that those have been thinned out as well.
And in regular shaded mode you can see that it hasn’t effected the detail quality any to remove those edge loops.
Now, with all these issues worked out, the challenge for the next week will be to decide on which project to work on. I know what I need to be working on, Sticks. I’ve been working on him for so long. And once I get him rigged and skinned, I still have to figure out how to animate him. And yet, the rigging process has been so frustrating at times that I get discouraged. That makes Greezbly all the more appealing to work on. Even though what I’m doing is tedious and repetive, and requires patience, at least I feel like it’s working. It may not be the most efficient, but it still feels like progress. The painting and the sign are projects that are easy to work on, for the most part, so they too can be an appealing alternative to bashing my head against Sticks’ rig. And then there is the new Robot model that I started but didn’t work on this week. Check back next week to find out what got attention and what didn’t.