Even though last week was technically a short week for me at the day job, it felt long and busy. That seems to be the way things go. That first week back after time off, even a fairly short amount of time, is always a little rough. For me it meant that I didn’t get to play until the weekend. I wanted to. But it seemed like all the time kept running together and I was at the end of my day before I even knew it.
I didn’t get to work on either of the paintings. I looked at the Ovation one a few times, but honestly, by the time I did look at it, my eyes were starting to blur and I wouldn’t have been able to see the dots as I put them down on the canvas. It probably didn’t help that the weather was in flux all week. I seem to be a bit of a human barometer and so weather and seasonal changes tend to play havoc with my head.
The weather finally settled a little on Friday and my head cleared so I was finally able to enjoy playing on the computer. I worked on the Penguin a little more. I gave it a body and shaped that up a bit. Then on Saturday morning, instead of doing what I needed to, I worked on the Penguin even more. Now it’s got a wing, or flipper. I think it’s a flipper. That took some real fiddling. I was concerned that it was sticking too far away from the body and that the body wasn’t the right shape to let the flipper fit in closer so I kept trying to adjust that. Then I happened to glance at the picture that is my inspiration for the Penguin and realized that the flippers are a bit out from the body as well.
Even though, when I shape the body and the head I shape both sides, for the details I am only creating them on the one side, like the eye socket, and the flipper. It will be the same with the leg and foot. I’m doing that because what I
will do once I have all the basic parts in, is delete the half that isn’t detailed and then mirror the detailed half and combine the two meshes at that point. That way I don’t have to worry about getting the symmetry right. Then, of course, with the basic symmetry created I can go back in and make things a little more asymmetric.
One of the things I discovered that I really like about creating in Maya is how easy it is to smooth an object and then still make adjustments to it. You can do it in 3DS Max, however, you have to do a couple of other steps to be able to do it without making a mess of the mesh and even then, the number of edges and vertices that you have to pick through to move things around makes it challenging and slightly frustrating. Or more specifically, eye crossing and headache inducing.
At some point, after I worked on the Penguin for a while, I realized that I might have been able to use a cube as the base primitive for the body instead of a cylinder. It might have worked better. Maybe. As it is I used a cylinder and tried to match it up to the sphere for the head. However, I ran into a small problem when I tried to bridge the edges for the two. I had created a couple of edge loops on the head to get a little more flexibility and detail in the modeling. This meant that when I tried to bridge the edges by selecting the ring set from the body and the ring set for the neck in the head, it wouldn’t work. It took a while to figure out that it was because there weren’t the same number of edges. For one there were 20 and the other 22. I hope to not make that mistake again soon.
Besides working on the computer art; I decided to work a little more on my holiday decorations. As you can see, one of them is a Lego Advent Calendar. That’s been fun. As a kid, my parents got us the Advent Calendars with chocolate so when I saw the Lego one,
I decided I really wanted one for this year. It’s been fun opening the windows and seeing what I get to build with the little packet of Lego bricks. I got the next section of the Santa’s Workshop set built. Next up is part 3 which looks a little larger. Originally I was going to put up a tree and put the Lego stuff under it. I may still do that, however, I am considering not bothering with the tree and just having the Lego sets.
I’m not sure how this week will go. There is a training thing at the day job that will run a little later than I normally work so that will up end the schedule for one day for sure. There is also a haircut on Friday. (Hair 453 needs to be trimmed.) And to go with all that, the weather is still changing. Even so, I expect to be able to carve out some time to give the Penguin a leg and foot and work on the rest of the Lego set. Maybe I will even make some time to work on a painting as well.