An Alien and a Snowman walked into a…wait…wrong story.
An Alien and a Snowman knocked at the door…
Well, that’s a bit closer, I suppose, if you consider they are the only projects I really worked on this week.
I did spend a lot of time working on the Alien, Greezbly. Once I got his clothes separated off, then I was ready to do a bit more refining and detailing. I polished some surfaces to get them smoother and the edges crisper. It has taken me a few tries to find the polish brush in ZBrush useful. In this case it worked well for some of the trim on the shirt. Along with the polishing I tried to add a bit of detailing to give the idea of some wrinkles at the joints and a little sag at the knees. Just to add more detail.
Once I had that detailing add, I decided to use an alpha to get more texture on the skin. Of course this lured me right into starting the polypaint process. One squirrel leads to another. I got half way through the polypainting and had to stop for a bit. I wasn’t terribly pleased with how my color choices were working out. Here I’ve got the face, hands, and shirt painted and just a glossy/shiny material on the pants and boots.
Even though I wasn’t excited about the color direction I went ahead and finished everything. I added some lights and did some test renders. I got all but the floor pass. It turns out, I didn’t have the floor turned on. So I tried it again with the floor on. It was a good thing. The floor pass was useful. It added just a bit of light to the lower areas so that the feet weren’t lost in the dark. Now I understand part of the reason so many people model their characters on a base or platform. You can use contrasting colors on it to get a better balance.
Here’s where I’m at with Greezbly. The first is just a straight image export from ZBrush and the second is the composite done in Photoshop. I still want to add a bag sort of thing and I’m not entirely sold on the colors so I may easily obsess over Greezbly again this next week.
Of course I do have other things to work on and tend to this week so I may have to temper the alien obsession a bit. This Friday (November 6th) is the reception at FuManchu Cupcakes in Charlotte. It’s from 7pm to 10pm. If you are in the area stop by and have
some great cupcakes and enjoy some really fabulous art. Yours truly will be there.
Now back to last week’s adventures. The Snowman. I finished modeling him. He was a lot of fun to work on. Probably because I’m really pleased with the way he’s turned out and he wasn’t much of a struggle to get right. Though I did have to do some work on the stick arms. At first, the angle I had them at, as well as a lack of bend in them, made him look really creepy. 
So I adjusted the overall angle of the arms and offset them a little and then I adjusted the bend where the elbow would be and made a few more tweaks to the hand type area. This helped quite a bit and made him more friendly than creepy. The next trick was to add the scarf. Since I’m in 3ds Max for the Snowman, and what will be this year’s Holiday Card, I had to figure out how to create a cloth looking scarf using box modeling. It turned out to not be that hard. A torus for the base primitive and a few faces extruded and then a few more and I was off and running. Getting it to lay nicely down the Snowman’s body took some patience and tinkerling. And the fringe. I had a rough idea of what to do there but when I 
went to do it, it didn’t work out the way I wanted. I had to add quite a few edge loops to get the a nice set of polygons on the end so that I could bevel them out long. This worked except they were attached to each other. I ended up doing half of them first and then angling them a little off from the straight out direction so they would have some distance between themselves and the next batch. It worked like a charm. Edge loops around the ends of the fringe help to keep some of the shape.
I did get to work on Sticks a little this week. As I expected the next few videos were on rigging the eyes. But I watched through them anyway. It was a good thing I did as there was some additional clean up in moving items to different layers, that was covered.
So I did the clean up and continued to watch the videos. I finished with the eyes and now it’s on to more of the facial controls. The tutorial I am using is designed for a character with eyes and eyebrows. Neither of which Sticks has. So I’ll be watching more of the tutorials until I get the the arm rig when I will start to work again.
There is plenty more to do. With my Snowman modeled I’m ready to start on the packages. And of course I’ll probably have some updates to Greezbly. And let’s not forget the reception at FuManchu Cupcakes. So check back for more news and updates.