I spent most of last week cleaning up and trying to recover from the trip to Florida. I went down to see my niece get married. It was quite an adventure and I returned with a gift from Florida. A nice allergic reaction to something. That, resulted in a short visit to an emergency room for some meds because there was no clinic open at 11:00 pm. It turns out that Prednisone and Benadryl are a really bad combination. Too jittery to sleep and too sleepy to concentrate.
So I did my best to keep busy but I didn’t really get to work on much. I built a few Lego kits. That was fun. I even ordered a set of just bricks to prototype something I want to build. I also put together a shuttle model from Meccano. It’s what I would call an
erector set but the brand on the box is Meccano. That turned out to be a bit of a pain. I think I may stick with Lego bricks.
Once I got past the meds and got some sleep so I could think again, I did a little work on that painting of the guitar head stock. So I thought I would share some work in progress pictures.
I even started working on the parts for the scene for the Worm Guy to sit in. I want him to sit on a leaf and I think I want a part of a flower to show. Originally, I was thinking I just needed to model
the leaf but as I think more about it, I may need to model more of the plant that the leaf is a part of. I will also need to model the flower. Probably the whole thing. This might get tricky but there are a few things I think I can to do to make it look the way I want and yet not require a ton of really detailed work. I think. I guess we’ll find out. In the mean time, here’s what I got done on the leaf so far. I haven’t added any texture or anything, just some rough modeling.
Oh. Remember I was going to try out one of the programs for painting texture on models. I finally downloaded Substance Painter 2. I think it’s actually 2.1 for anyone keeping score. So, like a lot of people, I don’t always read directions for a program when I first start using it. I didn’t this time either. That didn’t work so well. I couldn’t figure out how to get my model into the program to paint on it. I had to go to the support documentation to figure that one out. It wasn’t really difficult, but certainly not drag and drop. It also took me a little bit to figure out how to move around 
my model so I could see what the painting looked like. I tried watching some of the tutorials but I wasn’t really into it. However, I was able to get enough out of them that I could figure out how to export the image/texture that I created and was then able to apply it back to my model in 3DS Max. I used the first version of the Worm Guy to test this out with so there isn’t all the cool detail to the model. I just wanted to play with the paint.
I’ve got the 30 day trial of Substance Painter. At the end I’ll decide if I want to purchase it full out or get the subscription which will get me a couple more things in addition to Substance Painter, or I could decide to try something else. I’m not sure yet. It looks like it will do what I want and need to do, possibly a little better than trying to do it with regular UV’s and Photoshop. But it may take as much work to really master it as it is taking to learn 3DS Max. The tutorials look like they are going to be helpful but so far they seem to get a little more technical with regards to the technology instead of just showing how to use it. Then again, getting the texture and materials right on a model can really make a difference. Perhaps I should expect it to take some work to get good textures for my models.
Well now, isn’t that interesting. I think I might need to do some re-evaluation of my expectations. Stay tuned.