Last week was a short work week at the day job because I took off a couple of days. And like most short work weeks at day jobs, it meant there was just as much work as normal to get done. Fortunately, I wasn’t as exhausted from it as I could have been. That was nice. 
However, when it came to the weekend I was a little slow to get the whole productive weekend thing going.
I managed to get a little learning in during the week. I watched more of the texturing and materials tutorial for Maya. It was a good thing I did. And, I probably would have been better off watching more of it before starting the texturing for the Worm Guy. Not that what I did was bad or can’t be adjusted. That’s not it. The reason I would have been better off watching more of the tutorial is because it answered some of the questions or issues I ran into. Yep. Just a few videos down the road and I had an answer to why when I tried to render with Arnold the window was just black. And even a way to adjust the smoothing of things at render time instead of adding polygons to the base mesh.
It turns out there is an option under Arnold, in the Maya menu, for the Arnold view port. It also turns out that when rendering with Arnold and using said view port you get some options to setup the smoothing at render time. Oh and not only that, you can adjust your viewing angle in the Arnold render window. That’s cool. I have not tried any of it myself yet. But for sure, I will be soon.
Watching more of the tutorial wasn’t all I got done. I got started on that Funky Bird that I sketched in the meeting. You can see the progression of how it’s coming along in the pictures I’ve included. I got the base head shape done and then started adding the
neck and the body type area. While I was working on the body section, trying to get the bottom to look the right type of full I decided that ZBrush would be the best tool to do that. So I tried sending the model to ZBrush using the GoZ plugin except it wasn’t installed for the 2017 version of Maya. So, I had to install that first. Then I tried sending it over from Maya to ZBrush. That worked. I was able to make some sculpting adjustments to the shape of the lower half of the body so it’s more bulbous instead of flat. I didn’t add any sub-divisions to it or anything like that which made any sort of smoothing, even at a very low intensity level, very dramatic.
I ran into a snag trying to send the model back over to Maya from ZBrush. I’m not sure why. It could have been size. I had that issue with 3DS Max. Or I might not have done something right. I’m not sure. But instead of fighting it too much I just exported the
model as an .obj file and then imported it to Maya. That worked so I’m not too distressed about it not working as I expected.
Once back in Maya I decided to start on the helmet. You see in the sketch there’s a helmet on the head. And yes, it’s looking a bit cyclops like at the moment. Anyway. I knew the best and probably easiest thing I could do to make the helmet would be to duplicate 
the faces of the head that would make up where the helmet would cover and then I could take that and scale it and add detail to it. After I finally found the duplicate function and managed to execute it twice. I had a basic helmet the shape of the head which I could scale up just enough to add thickness. This sounds really easy. And I thought it should have been easier than it was. Well, ok the duplicating was easy. It was making the new shape a completely separate object that wasn’t. It took me quite a while to finally figure out, that when I made the duplicate Maya automatically grouped everything under the original object. It was very frustrating because I was trying to delete the extra duplicate and couldn’t do it without deleting other parts. I finally found the option to ungroup everything and now it’s all set. There will be more duplicating fun to come I have no doubt.
I did not get started on the rig for the Worm Guy. And I didn’t get the texture started for
the Penguin, though, now I’m glad I didn’t. I think I may finish the texturing tutorial first. I might learn even more stuff that could be really useful, like the bit on creating layered textures. That was cool to watch.
In addition to finishing up the tutorial, I am about to the point where I need to tackle some home projects again. I’ve got some cleaning out, rearranging, painting, reorganizing and the like that I need to do. I’ve been making some false starts at it over the last couple of weeks and I am to the point that I need to either just do it, or give up the idea of doing it. I think the ‘just do it’ option will work out better. Though, that means my home is likely to look like it has been hit by an indoor tornado until it all gets done. However, as some of what I hope to do includes getting rid of some stuff, I think it will be worth it. I will try to remember to take breaks and get in some play time so there are fun pictures to share instead of just me rambling about the chaos of my home.