There has been a lot happen around my place this week. Stuff in the studio and stuff in other places as well. Some of the projects are getting worked on and some of the art is getting worked on and I have pictures of both for you.
So. Projects. Quick update on the bathroom shower. I have decided to re-do the grout. I did a little test this week and found it to be in need of work. So that will be getting done though I did not start on it this week. Guess what did get started this week.
Yep. I got started on the painting. I started with the window wall in the music room since it’s small. As is pretty normal, I think it took longer to tape it off than it did to paint. You can see what a big difference the blue makes when you look at these two pictures. The tan just didn’t have enough life and now even the amp looks ready to go.
Of course, it looked so good that I had to paint the other end of the room as well. It’s a bit lighter but boy those guitars look a lot prettier against the blue than the tan. And there is an interesting effect of that lighter blue. It sort of glows when the light hits it right. It’s nice to have that sort of light bounce.
Yes the side walls will get paint. Sometime in the next couple of weeks. I will be painting the entry way first. My parents were awesome and came over to help. They taped off the trim and everything in the entry way so that it is basically ready to paint. I’m going to paint it the same color as the window wall in the music room.
As if painting walls wasn’t enough. And because after two days of that I was sore and needed some sit time. I did some art.
I’ve had ZBrush for like 4 years now and one of the things that attracted me to it was the FiberMesh tool and the grooming tools. All designed to make adding hair and fur easier 
and to make getting it to look right easy. In all this time, I have never once actually tried it. So in thinking about the little hairs I want on the Worm Guy, I decided I needed to try out FiberMesh. I put out a sphere, and masked it off and then added the FiberMesh and chose a color and fiddled with some settings and played with a grooming brush and cool.
After that I had to try out the Hair and Fur modifier in 3DS Max as a comparison. I wanted to know if one is going to be better to use than then other. So I put out a box and looked for the modifier. That was a little odd for me. It wasn’t where I expected it. But I found it and started fiddling with some settings and then added some color to the hairs, which didn’t quite work as I’d hoped. And then a
render. Not too bad. The interface for the settings isn’t nearly as intuitive and it takes work to get the hairs to have color. As far as how it looks it’s good. As far as the grooming, not as fun.
As I was thinking about this FiberMesh and Hair and Fur thing I started wondering if I could FiberMesh in Zbrush and then send it to 3DS Max. Logically it should work. It must work. I think I’ve seen some images that were done that way. So I tried it. Here is a sphere with FiberMesh that I sent from ZBrush to 3DS Max. It didn’t send any of the color over. I think because I didn’t save out any UV’s. I might want to figure that out. But I was able to get the model with the fibers transferred. So in 3DS Max I tried adding a material to the fibers and it worked. Again, not quite as I wanted. But it gets the job done for testing purposes.
And finally, I got to work on that Gibson Guitar Head Stock painting. I mentioned that I felt I was to the point I needed to do the background so I could tell how much more I needed to work on it. So I painted in the background and just as I suspected, the black is not near dense enough.
So I started working on making the black more dense. It’s really going to help.
This Gibson painting is the first of a few more that I intend to do and while I have a couple of guitars I can use for reference, it would be nice to have a few that might be more interesting. I have a colleague at my day job that was a touring musician for a while and he was very kind to allow me to visit his home and take pictures of some of his instruments. I’m excited to get to work on some of the pieces that are likely to come from that photo shoot. As with the Gibson I’ll be posting pictures as I go when I get them started. I want to finish this one first.
And I should have another surprise, maybe two next week. I’ve got some stuff in mind to start and some stuff in mind to maybe try over. And more painting. Stay tuned.