Sometimes I get started on a project and part way through it I wonder if I should question my sanity. If I’m lucky, I’m half way through the project or even further before this thought hits me. And if I’m not so lucky, it hits me early in the project. This can be a good thing, if I need to re-assess and try something different. I don’t think that’s the case with this birthday card project.
I started working on the second round of refining the letters, into their more balloon like letter shapes. That round seemed to go fairly quick. And you can see here how the top half of the letters look compared to the bottom. Not really a lot of difference. This is probably why it seemed to go fast.
Even getting the rest of it completed to the same level was fairly easy, I had it done in just a few days of working on it part-time. This should have been my first clue that I wasn’t really being aggressive enough with inflating the letters into puffy balloons. But at least everything is at the same level here. You can see how they all look. But when I apply the turbosmooth modifier, you can really tell that they’re not even close to looking like balloons.
Once all the letters were at the same level of refinement again it came down to deciding whether I continue to make small incremental adjustments to all the letters or if I go for the end result, or really close to the end result. The difference between the two is where I spend the time. I can either spend small amounts of time on each letter but have to touch them several times, over and over until it looks the way I want or I can spend a bunch of time on a letter to get it to look like I want and then spend a bunch of time on the next letter to get it to look like it belongs. This is where I started wondering if this was really the best idea, creating the letters from scratch instead of using a font and then enhancing it. But as I thought about what I would have to do to even with a font to get the letters nice and round and puffy, I realized it wasn’t going to make it any easier. It could make it more difficult depending on how 3DS Max were to build the faces. So…I decided I might as well go for it and make my balloon letters really look like balloons. I got started. But as you can see, even smoothed, it wasn’t enough.
I had to get even more dramatic. I selected the center faces on the side and transformed them so they were pulled out really far, and then I deselected the top and bottom faces and then did it again until I got to just the few in the center. Then I selected the edges that were along side the panel of faces that had been inflated and did the same thing. To make it a little easier I took the edges on both sides of the panel and adjusted them at the same time so I had some consistency. And I did it the same way I did the panel, deselecting the top and bottom sets until I got to the center set. Finally, I was starting to get something more like I wanted. It even looks right when smoothed. And from another angle.
That wasn’t quite enough though, because I really want things to look like the angles are creating choke points. Sort of like taking one of those animal balloons and twisting it or putting a rubber band around it. So the bar in the middle of the ‘H’ needs to puff out and look like it’s also being squished into the legs. I think this is going to work.
It turns out that getting it just right is a very time consuming process. It takes a lot of manipulating first faces and then edges and then vertices. And then doing it again. It means a lot of mousing and a lot of clicking. After last week’s episode with the wrist and arm pain, this could be a bit of a problem. With that much fine control needed I risk more of that pain. So I hooked up the Wacom Intuos to see if that would help but I couldn’t figure out how to move around in the view port with the pen, other than the zoom. I had the same trouble with the Cintiq. I could use the mouse on the Intuos, but that would defeat the purpose. I have a few other keyboards and mice hanging around and decided to try the wireless one on the other pc. It helped some. The mouse is smaller, but that wasn’t a perfect idea either. Too small a mouse is just as big an issue as too large a mouse. I do have one mouse that fits my hand really, really well. I have two of them actually. The Logitech M705. It’s just the right size. I decided that I would use a wired keyboard and that wireless mouse, and get one more of the M705 mice for back up. When I went to purchase the backup mouse, I found that Logitech also makes a 700 series wireless keyboard and mouse combo and wouldn’t you know, the mouse is the M705. So now I’m mousing with a properly fitting mouse and a wireless keyboard with a nice soft wrist support. I think this is going to work out as soon as I get used to how touchy the mouse is in 3DS Max.
Now that I’m comfortable again. I will just need to remember to get up and move once in a while, eat, sleep, all those little things. Check back again to find out how well things are progressing and if I’ve gone gaga from staring at the computer screen and manipulating vertices for too long.