Week 4 (Disaster!)

Ugh, so this week I had experimented further with the quadraw function in maya on the crocodile. It was not really getting me anywhere so I decided to try and figure out a technique my peer had taught me last week. That didn't work either. So I decided to just go in and manually delete and create edges to retopologize the mesh.

After awhile, I finally had it all finished and it looked much better than it did before. Sure there were a few tris, but there were no six poles, no ngons, and there was an edgeloop that cut the whole model in half. It was good enough for my purposes. I saved the file the night before presentations and went to bed. I woke up the next morning with the intention to make some screen grabs at the lab.

I get inside and I open up my file on my flash drive, only to get an Error Line 0, File unreadable. The file on my flashdrive was corrupt. No biggy, so I wont have pictures for my presentation. I can still go to my backup at home, work on the model some more, finish the skeleton that was basically done (just needed to be mirrored) and take screen grabs for this post, like I do every week.

I get home, and pull up my programs and open up the backup. Error Line 0, File Unreadable. My backup was corrupt as well. I scoured the internet for solutions and found that there IS still data on the file, but because I cannot read MEL, I can't tell what is good data and bad data, or whether my model, at the least, was salvageable. Sadly, I have nothing to show for my work this week, and I've essentially lost a solid 8 hours of work.

I'm bummed, yes, because I not only have nothing to post for my week of effort, but also because it's all gone. But, it's not a complete loss. I redownloaded the model (along with ALL of it's initial topology flaws) and will just slowly retopologize while working on everything else. I just wish I had something to show for this week.

Other than that, I took some advice from my critiques and added IK handles to the zebra from it's heels to it's toes as well as shortened it's tail.

Next week, moving onto the Giraffe is a must, because I need to move onto a different animal temporarily.