On Tuesday I went to the Bookworm of course. I find that after I eat breakfast, I tend to stick around and work there as well, occasionally striking up conversation or saying hello to the teachers when they drop by. More often than not, I wind up there til mid-afternoon. Afterwards I returned home and got cleaned up for an evening out with Ella and Emma. I had dinner at Pete's Tex Mex with Ella, and joined Emma and a few of their friends at a bar near the Underground.
The area is truly brilliant at night with all the neon signs and the massive restaurant spanning the river on a lit up bridge. Moreover the bars are an interesting blend of Chinese and Western culture, with traditionally architecture juxtaposed with TV screens playing American music videos and many American top 40 tracks playing over the speakers. Ell and Emma's friends speak less English than I speak Chinese, but we had a pleasant evening nonetheless. Here are a few pictures.
Second Life Update:
I found the process for making avatars with sculpted primitives very easy, despite the limitations imposed by the ability to deform the base (human) mesh. Making a creature larger than a human required two alternate workarounds. One could cheat the proportions with physical additions to the base character, i.e. a large forearm with a static hand that pivots at the base model's wrist joint rather than the elbow. A practical technique used by James Cameron and Stan Winston to articulate the life-sized Queen Alien in 'Aliens'. Or someone could use a third party program to create an animation that deforms the base model by moving the locations of the various joints beyond their set limits. (A technique I never learned.) With a bit of creative problem solving however I was able to make several interesting, non-humanoid creatures.
Now we come to polygon mesh modeling, which is very different.
A sculpted primitive model is made from many individual pieces (primitives), each sculpted and attached just so to the base model to appear as though it were a solid object. Therefore, a complicated shape, a creature's head for example, might be made up of dozens on individually sculpted elements.
A polygon mesh model is exactly what it sounds like. It is a single unified object. It's shapes and contours are dependent on the position of thousands of vertices connecting the entire grid of polygons together. It too can be made up of multiple objects, the teeth, for example are a separate element, grouped together.
The next step for creating a polygon mesh model is to lay out UV coordinates. The UVs themselves are basically all the pieces of the model cut apart, like one would do with fabric, and laid out in a two dimensional image so that a texture can be painted on them. This texture represents the detailed images applied to surface of the model to give it it's final appearance. Thankfully Zbrush makes this process much more painless than Maya, albeit not as optimized. On a standard UV map for a video game, the head would be much larger to maximize the amount of detail. But the resulting UVs are easy to read and perfectly usable for the project at hand.
The joints of the default skeleton are re-positioned to the approximate corresponding parts of the model. The skin of the mesh must then be bound to the skeleton, and the parts further adjusted by a process called weight-painting. Weight painting provides a grey scale gradient delineating which areas will affected when a particular joint is reoriented.
http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2013/264/9/f/utahraptor_turnaround_by_art_minion_andrew0-d6nal5o.gif
The model can also be animated by creating key frames on a timeline, representing the most extreme changes is the model's position. The computer calculates the necessary motions in between to give the animation a smooth transition between poses.
http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2013/268/d/9/utahraptor_idle_animation_by_art_minion_andrew0-d6nt7zn.gif
The major issue has been transferring this rigged model to Second Life so it can be finalized for sale. If I export the model directly from Maya and wear it in Second Life, the size of the model blows up so large that it either disappears completely or I am forced to the 0,0,0 coordinates of the sim (game environment).
If I transfer the file to Blender, a separate modeling program, and re-export it from that program I can wear the mesh in Second Life but it is deformed beyond recognition.
Once I can determine the cause of this issue I will have to address the trouble I've had uploading animations from Maya into Second Life. The entire process has become incredibly frustrating. Thankfully there are those on the Second life forums with more experience who have been giving me advice on how to solve my problems So I may yet succeed. I'm quickly reaching the point where persistence in this project borders on masochism.