Yes indeed. The letters now look like balloons. Really they do.
Since the ballooned or sculpted letters that I did last week came out so well I decided that I am sticking with those. Sometimes you do have to start over to make progress. This was certainly the case. I know sometimes we think we would have been so much better off if we had done something a certain way the first time, or even earlier in a process. I know I think that. This time, I’m aware of having learned some things by trying to do it the hard way first and then doing it another way. One thing I know I learned is that it is better to start with a more accurate or refined base to work from. You spend less time trying to fix it as you flesh it out. Doing that and then using ZBrush allowed me to more quickly and easily get the ballooned letters I want.
Though the letters were all ballooned out they didn’t quite look like balloons for me. They needed a little something extra. You know, that place where you fill them with air. So I sat about figuring out what to do for the air hole. I had thought about getting really detailed and making the part of the balloon and then a plug and such. Then I realized that it wouldn’t be seen. You will just be able to see the air hole bit, so to get really detailed for this project is just over kill, and a waste of time. See here, with the hole added just to the letters in ‘Happy’ it’s hard to really see the air hole bit. But it’s an important detail that adds to it.
To create the air hole I started with a torus. There were two challenges with it, getting the right size and the right number of sides. I did end up with too many sides going around to make the ring but had just the right about for creating the thickness. It had to be small-ish compared to the balloons as well. But trying to make it the right small to go with the balloons as they were was difficult. So I scaled the balloons up. I selected all of them and then chose local for my reference and then made sure they were set to scale uniformly.
Good thing because it turned out to be quite difficult to get zoomed in close enough to work on attaching the air hole to the balloons. So with the torus created then I extruded a loop of faces to create the part that attaches the hole to the rest of the balloon. I did the extrude a couple of times and then added some edge loops so that I would have a nice center loop of edges to work with. I selected the center loop of edges, on the inside as well as the outside. Remember, I extruded faces, that means I had a double faced tube basically. Since I didn’t want the inside ring to break through the outer wall I had to select both so I could scale them down in the x an y axis to shape the tube a little.
Next I had to figure out how to attach the hole. Well, first I made a few copies and got them lined up with the letters. Then I worked on where I wanted them on each letter. I was able to find good spots for them and attach them by removing 9 faces from the letter. I moved the hole in place and used the rotate tool to get it at just the right angle and then selected the letter, then attach and then the hole. Then I had to weld vertices from the letter to the hole. The only problem was that I didn’t have the same number for the letter as there were for the hole. So I made sure to make my attachments at even points around the hole and the once that was done I removed the edge loops that made up the extra points. I made sure to hold down the CTRL key while I removed them so I got rid of the vertices at the same time. All that work cleaning up that alien sure helped.
I figured out that even though I had welded the vertices, It wasn’t totally welded. I needed to weld the edges from the letter to the hole. Once I got rid of the extra edge loops so that I had only one edge between the welded vertices it was pretty easy. Though, I did have to be careful not to snag more than the two edges I was trying to weld.
Believe it or not all of that went pretty quick. Once I had a path and a method it was fairly easy to do. By the end of the week I was ready for texture.
I knew, after working on Sticks, that I was going to use the Rubber setting of the Arch & Design Mental Ray material, and I figured I was going to need to make it transparent. I also want pretty basic colors and for them to be bright and cheery. We’re celebrating
after all. So I started with a primary color and got it transparent. Since I haven’t added lights to the scene yet, I had to view the letters from an angle to see if I could see through them enough. The only thing is that even though I choose fairly base colors they looked a bit dull. Probably that rubber setting. So I decided to try making them 
self-illuminating. Wow. That really made them bright and cheerful. I used the Kelvin setting for all the colors though I noticed some colors needed higher or lower settings based on how bright I wanted them, as well as how much orange I wanted mixed into the final color. Much cheerier now.
The last thing I knew I wanted to get done for the week was to adjust the pivot point on all
the letters. They kind of got reset when I sent the letters to ZBrush from 3DS Max. That made for rotating around one while it was selected, a bit of a mess. As you can see here, some of the pivots were quite a distance from the actual letter. So I 
selected each letter individually and then selected the ‘effect pivot only’ option and then chose center to object. That has moved the pivot point up in the z axis as well as over in the x or y axis, which is not entirely what I want. However, it is much better than having the pivot off by 2 or 3 or 4 letters distance.
So that’s how the card is progressing this week. I’m still deciding on what to do about the background and the ribbons or string for holding on to the balloons. And I’m thinking I may need a little something holding the bunch of balloons. Those are the next bits to be working on. I would like to have this card done and up for sale by the end of this month. I think. I might be close enough to make that happen.
I got some feed back on the Sticks scene. Positive results for the polished looking floor. So I think I’ll go with that floor, and probably the same background, though I am tempted to try a light green for the background and see how that works. Either way, it’s looking like the next step there is to figure out how to set things up for the start of the animation, and then get started animating. Oh, I may take a still or two of how it should end first. Then I would have something for the SusanG Productions website, as well as something new for the store header. Wow. Progress.
There is still more to come and lots to do and there will be another card to start on once the Birthday card is finished. I recommend checking back to get a look at how far I’ve made it on the card and Sticks. Will I make my deadline on this one? And what is to come after?