Progress 10/26

This week, and in the last month generally, I worked on finishing up the Maya models of my heads, so they are ready to print on the 3D printer. As I do more and more modeling in Maya I find it gets faster and easier, although the models are still not quite as I imagined them, they are definitely serviceable and look fairly close to my ideal. Coming to terms with the fact that I cannot control everything and have it turn out perfectly has probably been the most difficult thing this past week, as I cut my animatic down significantly. I realized that at some point I have to accept that I can't produce everything to the perfect levels of a real animation studio that employs several thousand people and takes many years to finish a film, but I can do my best and set myself up to succeed in what I can accomplish, rather than setting myself up for failure by being overambitious and having more shots and characters than time allows.

The most enjoyable thing this week was probably feeling like I'm getting a grasp on the 3D printing process; I find I'm getting a lot less unexplainable annoying errors when I go to print, and the errors that do pop up I now know more or less how to deal with them, rather than it being a huge frustration and waste of time, like it was a few weeks ago.

 Some of my Maya head models, ready to print

Some tips if any aspiring stop-mo animators want to use the 3D printing process through z-print: obviously, you need to close up any holes in your geometry, but it is equally important to check every so often as you model to make sure that all the face normals are pointing outward. Especially check the normals before you smooth, because changing them after is a lot harder. Also, I found that running (Mesh): cleanup, with the settings checked to cleanup only polygons with more than 4 sides, can be a big help if you do it just before exporting out of Maya as an .obj file. This saves heartache later when you can't figure out why the Z-print preview has mysteriously dropped a lot of random faces on your model, leaving ugly holes instead.

3D printouts

Well, after many problems, troubleshooting, and complete redos, I finally managed to create a model that was compatible with the multiple programs required to print my puppet heads.
The most enjoyable part of the last few weeks was when I finally got a workable model, so I was able to get more creative and adjust it to get different expressions. By Thursday I should have some of the actual expression heads printed out; right now I only have the basic head (3 parts) in two different sizes. I've decided to go with the larger size for the rest of my models.

The most difficult part was, obviously, having to remodel so many times. But now I'm good to go, and I'm planning on modeling the other characters' heads shortly. The last picture shows the lineup of the expression heads in Zprint, just before beginning printing

head models

Well, after several weeks of problems with Maya modeling, including a broken hard drive, incompatibility between Maya versions, holes in models, and issues with normals, I am now on model #3 of the main character's head, so hopefully THIS one will work out and jive with the 3D printer. I also began modeling the mother's head: