Actually I do. However, sometimes, they can wait. At least that’s what I decided this weekend when I realized that I had spent the time I was going to go grocery shopping not doing that. Instead I spent the time rigging a worm.
It’s true. I thought I would spend just a moment seeing about creating the bones, or joints 
as Maya calls them, for the rig for the Worm Guy. And then I had to try to setup the IK handle and so it went. The thing about the Worm Guy, at least this incarnation of him, is that all I really want to do with him is to bend his body. I didn’t want to model him in pose because then I’m stuck with that pose if I want to use the character again, or I have to model it again, or I have to do a lot of work to change the pose. If I rig the character, even a little, then I can do more with it later.
Creating the joints wasn’t too bad. It didn’t make much sense to me at first and I think it will take some getting used to compared to 3DS Max. I managed to figure it out. Adding the IK handle which creates the constraint for how all the joints flow was a little tricky. When I first created it, and then tried moving it, the thing had him bending in on his belly, like doubled over laughing. Which would have been fine if that’s what I wanted. But it wasn’t. I tried a couple of things to get it to work and it wasn’t happening. I finally decided to just rotate the Worm Guy 180 degrees and then apply the IK to the joints and it worked.
Of course it wasn’t that easy. It never is. When I tried to rotate the Worm Guy I couldn’t get his eyes to go with the body properly. They were living in their own space. I finally ended up parenting them under the body and then it would all move at the same time in the same direction. It took me ages to finally decide to parent them though. I was looking for an attach option that I couldn’t find. And then I couldn’t find the Parent command. At least that I remembered from one of the tutorials, I just used the ‘p’ key.
With all that figured out and the joint chain created I had to skin the body to the joints. 
That took a couple of tries. Then it was time to figure out how to weight the joints to the skin and make everything look reasonably right when I started bending him. The first try was a mess. The second try took some work and I had it. I thought I was all good and then I deleted the history and lost all the weight settings. Ugh. Third time was the charm and I managed to not take quite as long as I did on either of the previous tries. I might like weight painting in 3DS Max better.
Twice this weekend I sat down to work on rigging the Worm Guy. The first time I got side tracked with the materials. I wasn’t too excited about the way the colors and materials came out when I rendered them initially. He looks too much like Ironman. Don’t get me wrong. I like Ironman. I just wasn’t going for that look on my Worm Guy. So I fiddled with the materials some and kept trying to get closer to the cartoon like look that I had in mind. That took some real work. Arnold didn’t want to do things the way I wanted to do them. I finally got some things figured out, like to use the color correction, or even to save as an .exr file. I figured out something else when I did the renders for the posed version of the Worm Guy. For that I used Maya’s render window and set it to use the Arnold renderer instead of what I had been doing which was using the Arnold Viewport. This got me what I was expecting. Finally.
I’ve included some of the earlier poses and 
renders so you can see some of the difference and here he is, the Worm Guy, rendered in his final pose. At least for now.
Now I can get on with setting up the scene for him. That will be interesting.
I have to say, after the issues I had with Arnold I’m not sure how I feel about it. I really like the feature where you can add the
smoothing at render time like it does. Still, the bit with being able to see the materials correctly, that is a little annoying. I think I’m going to have to come to terms with it though. If the tweet I read on Friday is true, it looks like even the next 3DS Max will have Arnold instead of Mental Ray. So, for the moment it looks my choices will be the application’s native renderer, Arnold, or figure out how to get and use some other external renderer. We’ll see how it goes. It will be interesting to see how Arnold is implemented in 3DS Max and if it has the same cool feature(s) as well as the same issues.
This week I have a free evening. I would have two except for that grocery shopping I neglected to do at the weekend. That extra day could be really productive, or really lazy and at the moment, I’m not sure which way it’s going to go.
And late breaking news. The ZBrush Summit for 2017 has been announced. It will be the weekend of October 6-8. And apparently, part of it will start on the 5th as a stream only. I need to get over to the site and sign up for updates.