This has been a busy week. And, Wow, productive. I’m pretty excited about it. I’m looking forward to more of this. I’ve got ideas and I’m getting them executed and, yeah. Just cool.
I could sit back and try to figure out what I did this week that makes it feel like it’s been so good but really, I’m just going to roll with it and try to keep it rolling.
I told you last week that I have an idea for my business cards. And I do. And now this week, with the progress I have made on the FunkyBird I am starting to get an idea for how to revamp the SusanG Productions website. I’m not completely there yet. But the idea is forming, it’s percolating.
I spent this week working on FunkyBird. I got the wing cleaned up and added the extra bit of refinement I wanted. It was a little too flat so I added some edges and made some lanes that I could puff up to look a little like bones going through the wing and the fingers. That helped a lot.
At that point I kind of wanted to see how he was going to look with two legs and two wings so I decided it was time to cut out the one side and mirror over the other with the leg and wing. I had to adjust his leg first though. I made it nice and chunky and it turned out to be a little too chunky because if I had mirrored it over as is, it would likely have fused the two parts of the mesh together. So I moved the leg out into a little wider stance so that the mirror wouldn’t cause it to get messed up.
With FunkyBird having matching sides I was ready to work on the beak. I thought about just doing half and then doing the mirror again and chose not to. I just worked on the entire beak, the whole thing. Just tried to keep the poly count low at first to make it easier
to keep track of the vertices that I was moving around. Then I added more edges to help refine the look. It took a bit of fiddling. When I started out, and with such a low poly count, the tip kept coming out very rounded even if I tried to make it pointed. To get the point to stay I finally had to add more vertices, attached to edges of course. That, let me maintain the point and gave me more to work with to add even more detail to the beak shape.
Things were flowing so nicely that as I got the beak done up, I was right into getting a spot for the eye socket. I added some edges in a ring around the faces that I wanted to use to extrude inward and then once that was ready I extruded the faces into the head to create the socket. Then I selected the vertices that defined the corners and such and moved them around to make the shape a little more rounded looking. I’m not near done with this part. I’ll be working on it this next week for sure.
Someone said to me, a few weeks ago, that the WormGuy really needs a better name. And they were right. For that matter FunkyBird needs a better name. So as I was working on FunkyBird this week, I came up with their names. The WormGuy, turns out to be fairly simple, his name is Walter. Walter Worm. The FunkyBird, turns out he’s got some flare. His name is Funkatmyer Aviter. Funky for short. Yeah, quite a guy this one. He should be fun to continue to work with.
For the week coming up, that should be interesting. Of course the day job is going to be busy. We’re into the big project that involves a lot of my knowledge and expertise and for that matter will require a lot of knowledge transfer. The catch for the day job this week, is that I took Friday off. I’m extending my three day holiday weekend to four days. Just because, why not. As for the fun stuff. I’m thinking Funky is going to get some more work. I still want to work on that scene for Walter. It might be time to start on one of Funky’s friends. There’s this dapper looking Dawbry that’s interested in getting modeled. And then Squiddy might be ready to be fleshed out a bit more. Who knows what the week with bring. Come back and find out.