Real Work Delays

Delayed due to exhaustion.

This week came to a halt, as of Friday, Feb 28th. The day before that, I was going to work on the audio project. However, my wife was home, so I wasn't able to get to do that. Then, from Friday to Friday, I've been working long hours at work. My co-worker is either taking a break or told to take some time off from her doctor. It's been crazy so I haven't been able to focus on anything. I've been working on things here and there, but nothing concrete. I did happen to meet someone who has also worked on creating models. We've exchanged info, but I doubt we'll actually work together on anything. We both work long hours and our free time is valuable.

Robotech Valkyre Day: 50 Work Hours 36hr 30min (give or take a few hours)

The only chance I had to work on this was these last two Sundays.

Now that the plane looks pretty good, I decided to take all the parts that I've made and converted them into the Mech. I've done this before, but this time I didn't worry about how they transformed but how do they look in the robot form. I set a keyframe as the plane and then created another one with all the parts as the robot. Well, it looks terrible, and I'm not sure if they belong in their proper place. It wasn't hard to find a drawing of what the robot looks like, and with that, I was able to properly place the arms and legs. From this, I discovered a lot of things I didn't know. For example, the legs are brought down by a hinge underneath the chest plate, connect to the nose cone, and then released from the hinge so it's separate from the chest plate.

With the robot image, there four major areas that need to be done.

1) The arms need to be reshaped to be more like the original Mech. Most of the remodeling has already been done, and I already added seems to unwrap the mesh. I'm wondering if I will need to use a subsurface modifier on it, but then I'm not sure if I needed it in the first place.

2) The head is "UGLY" I only created a too simplistic version because it's buried inside the plane. I tried remodeling the head, but it had gotten worse. I think it would be best to scrap this one and build a new head from scratch.

3) It needs hands. I did make another base mesh for the hands, but the fingers are not separate. It looks like the Penquin's Flipper hand from Tim Burton's Batman Returns. Another problem I've discovered that the hand will be officially too wide to fit into the forearm when it's in the plane form. I can probably have it rotate 90 degrees and the problem's solved, or I can just have them disappear. Either way, I don't think it will be a problem unless I make it the problem.

4) The final area is the connecting joints of the model. This is the really tricky problem because these are all the none visible parts. These should hopefully make the model feel solid and connected, not floating in place.

Granted this doesn't mean that this is the end of the Valkyre. My new college/friend informed me of how Unreal is a free engine that I can use. I would really like to make this animated and look really good, and this might make that possible. However, I've already had plans to send this to SheepIt to render out. I learned never to change horses in the middle of the race, and I don't think that's going to happen now. Maybe, I'll use it towards my next project.

One last thing before I sign off. I'm making a few changes to the website. I'm adding three new galleries. These new galleries are not permanent. They are here to hopefully show off my progress and my growth as an artist and depending on how busy I get, or how redundant it can be, they can easily be removed. The other thing I've been thinking about is Facebook. Maybe it's time to get back into it. I'm no longer craving the approval I thought that I needed. However, I'm missing out on the interaction between artist and client.