Some weeks are more productive than others. This week has turned out to be fairly productive, just not with a lot of variety. And that’s ok.
Over the weekend I got really tucked into working on the folding chair for the TKD Guy project and that has continued. I made some really good progress and I have been able to keep that momentum going. Which means, that is pretty much all I have been working on this week. I’m finding that there are some parts of the chair that I can create just from some photos I found on office supply sites, and then there are some parts that I need better reference photos. That means I am probably headed to one of those actual office supply stores to get some better reference pictures. We’ll call it a field trip.
I got a little sketchbook time in. Not the digital kind, the physical pencil and paper kind. Here are a few the most recent ones.
One of the other big steps for this week was setting up my Patreon site. I’ve included a link at the side of the page if you are interested. The way Patreon works is that you pledge support for a project either on a monthly basis or a per creation basis. You can pledge as little as $1 or as much as you want and you can cap how much you pay per month. It’s a really nice setup. I was going to set it up as a monthly subscription but since some of the models take a while for me to create, I think a per creation is better. So right now, what a patron would be supporting is per completed model for the TKD Guy project. That is a completely modeled and rigged, if it requires it, model. So the chair won’t be done until it is completely modeled and rigged so it can easily be animated. Other creations to be supported would be fully finished static scenes like the Holiday Card or even, when finally finish, an animation.
I still want to get back to the dolphin and crane sculpts that I started in ZBrush. But as I am on a roll with the chair I think I’ll see it through. I do want to have a couple of really nice sculpts completed by the ZBrush Summit at the end of September so I may take some time in the next couple of weeks and focus on those to get them finished up and polished.
I found a great tool for handling reference pictures. I was reading an article that one of the tools used was Kuadro. I looked it up and it’s great. I’ve used it a couple of times already. It lets you create a reference set of photos for what you are working on and then opens them up all at once. The pictures, once open have a low profile frame so there isn’t a lot of wasted screen space and you can easily zoom and then pan in the frame. I really like this tool. The only thing I would like to see, and it might have it I just haven’t found it, is a display of the file name of the picture. Then again, it is a pretty awesome tool for free or donation.
Oh, and one last thing. I was excited about this. Autodesk has announced the new features for 3DS Max 2016 and for Maya 2016. I’m more excited about 3DS Max since that’s what I’m using right now and the new features seem to be more across the board. I’m looking forward to seeing the rendering improvements and options I think that will be cool and might allow me to delay a dedicated renderer for a little longer. But there are a lot of great things to come. It looks like a lot of the Maya improvements are in the Bifrost tool and since I haven’t had a chance to use that yet, I won’t know the difference. Autodesk also announced the Mudbox 2016 and several other updates this week. So much news and great stuff to look forward to.