After spending so much time last week and weekend working on Sticks and getting him fixed up I woke up Monday with some lovely pain in my hand and forearm. A rather annoying occurance. I sometimes spend a bit too much time mousing on the computer too intently. The pay off for this, besides the progress on whatever I’m working on, is a bit of what is probably some carpel tunnel. Or at least repetitive motion issues. There are all sorts of things that can help but the first issue is getting the pain to go away. Which keeps me from doing things I want to do. For me this time, it was mid to late week before I got some descent relief. At which point I set about making it worse again.
I started the next project. I believe I have mentioned that I feel it is time to get another card prepared and posted. So that’s what I started on. I’ve decided on a Birthday card. It took a bit to come up with how I want to do it. Good thing I had that thinking time while my hand and arm were resting. At this point I’ve decided to go with some balloons saying Happy Birthday and I was thinking of having, just at the bottom, Sticks’ hand holding the strings to them. Then some one reminded me of an idea I had worked on for them a few years ago, so now I’m reconsidering if I want to use Sticks’ hand or another one.
I want the balloons to be interesting and really balloon like. Instead of using a font and creating letters that I then have to edit and manipulate to have more personality, I decided to make the letters myself from base primitives. In this case I started with a cube for all the letters. Here’s a look at what some of them looked like just roughed in. As you can see at this stage there is a lot of work to do on some of the letters.
From this point the first step was to make the shapes look like the letters they are meant to be. This involved some addition of edge loops and some edge and point manipulation to get things in a better shape and position. In some cases I also had to extrude faces to then match them up to another leg or side of the letter. I would select the faces, extrude them just enough, then I would delete the faces I had selected as well as the faces they would be meeting up with. With no faces, I chose the edges that made up the outline of the faces I had deleted. I used this to move the edges closer to the side I wanted to connect them too and when I got them close enough I switched to the point selection mode and welded the appropriate points. Now no holes and a fully connected letter. Some good examples of letters that were done this way are the ‘A’, ‘P’, and ‘B’. I also had to do this for the ‘R’ and the ‘D’.
The inside cutouts on some of the letters have been a little tricky. Since I started out with a cube and extruded faces to make the shapes, all the cutouts like on the ‘B’ or ‘P’ are mostly square. Ultimately that’s not what I’m going to want. But I’ve got to start somewhere. So square insides it is. I will be fixing this as I continue to 
refine the shapes.
I have managed to complete a first pass on all the letters so they all look like the letters they are meant to be.
You might be wondering why it doesn’t exactly spell out Happy Birthday yet. I’m trying to work smart. Instead of creating every single letter and then trying to get both ‘P’s or both ‘A’s to look exactly a like, or at least really close, I am creating one of each letter I need and then, once they are complete, or close to, I will copy any letters that I need to finish things out. Remember this is the first pass. I still have more refining to do.
It looks like it’s going to take at least two more passes maybe three to get things really just right. For the second pass I’ve started trying to refine the letters more and I was thinking I 
was plumbing them out to make them a bit more poofy and balloon like. But when I added a Turbosmooth modifier to the shapes, they really don’t have the volume I want. You can see the difference of the ‘H’ and ‘A’ here as compared to the ‘P’. So I’ll get the rest of the letters to the same level of refinement and then do another round, probably adding more edge loops so I can smooth out some areas and hopefully get things even fuller. I’m still trying to decide if I want them to be mylar style balloons like you get at the grocery store or closer to regular type balloons that just come in the long shapes or the round shapes, not usually in letter or special shapes.
That’s where I’m at this week. No, I didn’t work on Sticks so no new pictures or animations of him for now. I won’t be forgetting him. Really, he’s got work I need him to do. I’ll be getting back to him soon though. And I’ll be getting this card farther along. Yes, even in spite of the pain from too much mousing. I find it very hard to stop and rest for very long. So even though it would be better for me to take a good long break of a week or more, I probably won’t. I will continue to work on things in small chunks and also work on ways to make things more comfortable, and hopefully alleviate the strain that causes the pain. It will take some experimenting. But I have several ideas that I will try first and then a few more that I will try later if those don’t help.
In the mean time I will keep clicking away making 3d computer art and animation because that’s what I do. Come back and see what I get up to next.