20 February 2003 - Day 8

Sunday seems like it was just yesterday.. it's been a busy week and the paying stuff takes obvious priority so I've not really had a chance to work on the Dragon till tonight.

Yesterday I was working on a garment print design that was commissioned by an online clothing co... It was based on the "Red 'n Dead" design (gallery section) and I'm really looking forward to seeing how it turns out now. ooh! It's just nice to take a break from the norm.

On another note: I just got an email today from Tito over at the 3DFestival site (Copenhagen 3d Conference) telling me this diary is linked from their news site. Wowee it's all good fun! . BTW- if anyone wants to buy me a bucket of beer you'll find me at the 3D Festival this year 7-10th May :)

While I'm on the subject: a big thanks to the Team at GFXArtist.com as well for being the first ones out there. If anyone finds my stuff in the least interesting you should pop over to their site for a mass of inspirational art in their superb community/gallery.

 

Well enough of being a sycophant.. I came here to paint Dragons:

I was going to start working on the head today, but I really wanted the sketch as a reference and my printer's buggered. I could always swap to it with photoshop in the background but I just prefer to have it on paper at the side of the monitor. If I remember to print out a copy at work tomoorrow I'll leave that for the weekend instead.

 

Back to the body then.. when I'd left the body last time I noticed there was a strange glitch when cloning the object. I'd kinda hoped I was just tired and missed something -and that it would "magically" go away when I started on it again.

I was wrong.

It seemed like a small problem at first; all it was doing was making a brighter version of the object (and ONLY on this object). If I select the object and attach it to the original it's fine again, but I need it separated for the clone-smooth trick. You may not think this would be such a problem, but the object was bleaching out so I couldn't see the detail while modelling- effectively making it useless.

About an hour of headache and I suspect it's just a bug in Max 5*.. I can't seem to reproduce what's causing it, but finally discovered the problem. In the object properties the object display has been set to "vertex illumination" instead of "soft selection colour". Soft selection colour doesn't seem "right" to me either but visually it's just the job.

(*read: "feature" if you're an employee of Discreet and want to give me all my future upgrades for free)
If ever you come across this problem here's where you fix it:

 

Spent another hour burning CD's and backing up a load of stuff that should've been done ages ago..

 
Finally, a steaming hot cup of tea and it's time to look at the body again. :) As usual I saparate the area I want to work on (by selecting the appropriate polys and using "detach". I then hide the rest and clone the obect.
The first thing I wanted to try was a series of larger underbelly plates. Lizards tend to have much larger and tougher scales on their underbelly and I just wanted to make some that are in proportion to the huge scale of this lizard. A "dry run" for the technique shows that I need to even out the spacing and flow along the edges.
I clean up the edges and add the plates properly. Then it's onto defining the musculature on the body. While the body's the right shape it does need plenty of surface detail to make it convincing that there's an underlying structure. I still want it to look relatively lean (and hungry) so I add a hint of the ribcage and plenty of muscle definition. The plates are looking a little hard edged agains the flow of the rest of the body, but I'll look at that again properly tomorrow..

 

About an hour-and a half's work.. (after about 3 hours gettingstuff. fixed )