Polygon & Sub-D Workflows: Part A

Starting the next tutorial, this time building a Raptor. Boy it's refreshing to work with organic shapes! Started out by putting image planes of drawings of the Raptor from the Front, Top, and Side, then began building the forms.

You can see that there is a weird thing happening with the connection of one of the toes onto the foot in the second picture. I figured out that I had the normals reversed before I connected the pieces together and solved the issue. (I also had that problem with the Arm) Not sure how the normals got flipped on me, but oh well!

Introduction to Modeling: Part B

This project started out really badly (Part A), where I built the little cap that is reused in each layer of the Swiss Army Knife. I had to switch between Sub-D & Polygons, which caused me a lot of problems. I think I have a better handle on how to work between the two methods now, because the rest of the knife came together pretty smoothly. Used a lot of different techniques with Polygons, Sub-D, and Nurbs. Plus learned how to do some simple clean-up to get 4-sided polys.

I was disappointed that the texturing aspect of this lesson didn't teach how to create the same photo-realistic look from the demo pictures. It just used some basic blinns for everything, so I played around with adding my own materials, lighting, and a basic backdrop. The one thing I wasn't able to do was get a Swiss Army logo to project onto the enameled surface. Will probably learn more about this in texturing lessons.

Introduction to Modeling: Part A

Onto the next Digital Tutors tutorial, this one is call intro to Modeling and takes the user through the steps to create a swiss army knife. It's been quite challenging so far - more so than building the space ship because I am asked to match shapes from images planes. I am also doing more complex operations like attaching Nurbs surfaces in addition to being careful to build "good" geometry. Here are two images from my process so far.

Thumbs & Color Studies

Here are some sketches that I did in preparation for the project I'll be building. I also did color studies of my 3 favorite scenes. I really want to do an image of the dog & females characters on the top of a building as well, but don't want to make an impossible amount of work for myself. I'm trying to incorporate a wide variety of materials (glass, fabric, metal, etc) into each image.

The characters that I'm working with are:

The Inventor: the father figure, inventor, and spy handler
The Android: a robot femme fatale designed in the image of the Inventor's mother
The Puppy: the Inventor's adopted son

Introduction to Maya 2011: Part C

The last part of the tutorial taught me how to light a scene with directional lights, create an image plane to hold a matte background, create a dome to bounce reflections, and batch render.

The images below show before and after in my lighting process. The last image with the desert background is from Digital Tutor's tutorial as a comparison.

I'm pretty satisfied with the lighting results that I got. I definitely chose a harder background to work with than the tutorial came with. My background has harder directional shadows plus some beautiful blue shadows and pink highlights and it was important for me to learn how to simulate this.

You can view my final render here. Almost thrilled with the results but a couple things that bug me are outside of my knowledge base: the cast shadows on the ground are the wrong color and the smoke doesn't cast a shadow.

Introduction to Maya 2011: Part B

In the next section of the Intro project I learned how to organize the files into groups and parented structures as well as some simple rigging using nurbs circles as parents for main objects. The most complex thing was creating a joint-chain that connects the cables from the racer to the engines. I did the chain backwards and had to start over (which was frustrating but a good lesson), however the result of a rope-like effect was worth it.

I also learned how to write some expressions to create a random movement in the engines as well as creating a couple new attributes that would make animation simpler. (I love CG movement, as evidenced in my devotion to the "wiggle" expression in AfterEffects!)


Next I learned how to keyframe animation and create animation that follows a path. You can see my basic animation here.

The next part was learning about dynamics which I've toyed with rather extensively in AfterEffects, so the concept was not new. It was, however, very exciting to play with particles in 3D for the first time. We used "Fire", "Lightning" and a generic particle system for the Smoke. I'm not happy with my Smoke result - somehow the instructor's project (done with the same variable input) turned out much more realistic. I messed around with this for a few hours and decided to let it rest as is!
We haven't actually gotten around to lighting, rendering, or cameras YET, but I wanted some instant satisfaction so I rendered out this spectacular composition. So excited to do this with my own ideas...!

Moodboard

I've been thinking about the illustration project that I'm going to complete with this independent study since Winter Break started. I can't wait until I know how to put my vision together in Maya!

The following images are collectively my moodboard for this project...