Yes, I am still working on balloon letters. And I am still wondering if this was the best idea. I am probably repeating myself when I say “who knew”. Who knew making letters all balloon looking was going to be so tedious and time consuming. Normally I’m ok with
tedious. And mostly I’m ok with the tedious part of this. However, some things are already getting old.
Again, as I was preparing the pictures for this post I realized that the two additional letters I thought I had finished this week will need more work. It’s the same thing that happened last week with the ‘H’ and the ‘A’. With those letters, I thought I was done until I saw the pictures of them as their thumbnail image. It turns out that the thumbnail can function a bit like the old trick of stepping way back from a painting, or turning it upside down, or squinching your eyes, so you can see if your layout, design, and actual work, is holding up as you expect. I hope to remember that this next week.
I did go back and fix the issue I was seeing in the ‘H’. The inside of the right hand leg was too flat. I went in and pushed and pulled the vertices around to get a nice full, on all sides, right leg for the ‘H’ and I think it came out pretty good. Here is a shot without turbosmooth and a shot with it. Now we’re really looking balloony.
With a nice balloon looking ‘H’, I have a true gauge for the rest of the letters. I also noticed that he ‘A’ needed some work. Especially after getting the ‘H’ right. You can really tell it here.
So I worked on the ‘A’. There isn’t a lot of cool things to learn or do with this process. Well there might be but I haven’t found them yet. It has all been a lot of transforming vertices and edges. Mostly in the form of moving them as opposed to rotating or scaling. I did finally get the ‘A’ looking better. Here it is without and then with the turbosmooth modifier. I like to use it because it smooths out the faceting and makes it easier to see if I’ve got the shape balloony enough.
Next up the ‘P’. Again, I thought it was done but I now see that it needs a little more work. It shows up particularly with the turbosmooth on don’t you think?
With the ‘P’ I didn’t have enough edge loops originally to make the bump look very rounded. Especially on the inside. It was sadly angular and ugly. So once I had the bulk of the shaping done, or so I thought, I added more edge loops so I could get better control of the shapes and a more refined look. Since I thought I was done I moved on to the ‘Y’. This one has been surprisingly uncooperative. It has not been particularly easy to get really balloony looking. I got one of the upper arms too skinny and had to fix that and then I found
that I had it’s leg too fat. It was really out of proportion with the arms. I so wanted to call it done but as you can see, it really isn’t. I will be working on that one again this week.
I did get a little tired of moving vertices around and decided to spend a bit of time one evening working on that studio sign that I started so many months ago. It’s coming along. I’ve almost got the entire background, first layer, done. When I get that far I’ll try to remember to get a pic of it so I can post it here. I’m hoping that with that piece, the only thing that I will need to go in and make denser will be the background and not the additional illustrations.
Remember the swing arm I was telling you I had ordered to mount my Cintiq to my desk? Sure enough, it was delivered just as I was finishing up last week’s post. I was really curious to see if it was going to work out so as soon as I had everything uploaded I shutdown the computer and started figuring out how to attach the arm to my Cintiq and then how to attach it all to my desk. Or, wait. I had to attach it to the desk first and then to the Cintiq. Not any easy thing to do as one person. But I managed. And, it works great. I like the flexability it gives. I can even get it high enough so I can stand if I want. Though so far I have only used it while sitting. And that has been so much better. I can get it nice and close for drawing or moving vertices. I took a couple of pictures of it for you. I may end up moving it back along the side of the desk where it is mounted. I’m not sure yet. Ideally I would mount it on the back of the desk so it cantilevered out over the desk surface, however, my desk is too deep for that to work. It would give me the same problem as before, maybe worse.
And in case you are wondering, my eyeballs are not completely pixelated yet. I took a little time away from the computer to see Disney’s Zootopia this weekend. Yes, with all the kids. It was a good movie. I really enjoyed it. I can’t wait to get it on Blu-Ray so I can watch it a thousand times. There is so much in that movie. It’s really involved. Lots of models, and characters, and animation, and fur, and wow. I’m looking forward to getting to read about it in one or another of the magazines I get. As intricate as it is I kind of wonder if they used the Hyperion renderer for it like with Big Hero 6 or if they used something else. I couldn’t tell from the credits.
That’s the update. For now, it’s a lot more of pushing around vertices until I get things right. With a little luck, and patience, the additional adjustments to the ‘P’ and the ‘Y’ won’t take too long and I’ll be moving on to the rest of the letters very soon. I have a feeling that ‘B’ is going to be a challenge and the ‘R’ is looking a little cagey too. So check back next week to see how it’s going. You never know, I might have more doodles from another day job meeting or maybe I’ll get that last bit of background filled in on the sign. Or who knows…