This week has been about getting home projects finished up. I finished the grout in the shower last weekend and during the week I did the caulking in the corners and was finally able to use the shower again this past weekend. I was sure happy to finally have that one completely done.
This weekend was spent primarily working on home projects. Once again, thanks to my Dad who came over both Saturday and Sunday to help. Saturday,we installed new quarter round trim in the kitchen on the floor next to the cabinets. For some reason I thought that would be a fairly easy project. It wasn’t. It turned out to be a really big pain. I forgot to put on my knee pads so my knees are bruised and I got in a fight with the claw end of my hammer and managed to ding my thumb pretty good. But we did finally prevail and it’s done and looks so much better. Sunday was a trip to IKEA for some shelves for the music room. That project wasn’t too bad. The shelves when together pretty easy and we got them in place without tripping over guitars or anything else. For now I think the home projects, that I’m willing to tackle, are done. Until, I decide to work on the studio. I’ve got a color picked out for the walls so I could start the painting bit. But I think I will take a break for a while.
As I am still in between computer art projects I’ve been working on the Ovation guitar painting. It’s coming along. I got the leaves around the sound holes filled in. I was really pleased with the last of the darker browns. I was able to get really close to the color on the guitar. Of course, since I only had the one place to use it, I mixed too much. Oh well. I did pretty good getting the lightest color. It was really light and so for each layer I made it a little darker. This should give it some depth, I hope.
As I was looking at the leaves and comparing them to my reference pictures, I once again, figured out that the shoulder wasn’t right so I adjusted the curve again. The bad thing about doing that was that it meant I needed to go back in and fill that area with the first two color layers and try to match them up. I’m not sure how well I’ve done that and I’m hoping to mask it better as I continue to work on it. Since I had the crimson and flame red out to fill that new area I decided to try working on the quilted finish look. I’m a bit surprised. I think I’m going to be able to do it. The only problem I’m running into is the flame red looks dull next to the crimson for some reason. It doesn’t have the vibrancy it needs. I’m not quite sure what to do about that. It will take some thought.
I know I’ve mentioned before wanting to learn Maya better so I can start doing some of the modeling in it. I keep thinking and saying that. And when I think about it, I’m usually in the middle of a project or two already. And one of those might have some sort of deadline on it. When that is the case, it’s much easier to just default to the familiar and continue on. Right now, though, I’m not in the middle of a 3D art project. I have a few that I was working on but have reached a point where I kind of need to start over, or take a different approach. When I realized that, I decided that this would be a good time to work on learning Maya again. So I’ve started watching some tutorials again and I’m hoping to actually start working on something later this week.
In preparation for learning Maya, I downloaded and installed Maya 2017. As I was watching one of the tutorials they mentioned rendering in Arnold. I was thinking why would they talk about that, it’s a different application and this is supposed to be just
about Maya. It turns out, one of the lovely new features in Maya 2017 is the integration of Arnold as a built in renderer option. Cool. And yet, one more thing to learn. That’s about as far as I’ve made it with the tutorials though. I’ve a few more in the one lesson I’m watching and then I’ve marked a bigger one to watch next. At some point I’ll get brave enough to try to model something on my own in Maya.
For those who might be wondering why I would be trying to learn Maya if I’m still learning 3DS Max and ZBrush, I have a couple of reasons for this. One, is that they each have things they do very well and usually better than the other programs. There is also a difference in which industries use which programs most. I’ll try to cover more on the differences and reasons in a future post.