That's Not an Unimaginative Popular Culture Reference! That's an Unimaginative Popular Culture Reference!!!

The title makes it quite self-evident that this post is going to be about a knife. Doesn't it? Last week our homework given to us by Phil out Maya tutor-technician (tutnician or technitor, if you will) was to finish modeling the combat knife we started in class, at least to a certain point.

The base image (duh).

We were given a base image to place onto a plane with which to use as reference. With the image in place we began by using the quad draw tool to create planes which were to become the handle.

The plane was then extruded to create half the handle (the knife will be mirrored and stitched together later) and the knife's button was added.

Knife handle with button visable.

Afterwards more edgeloops were added so that the screws could be added into the handle.

The inner faces of the handle were also extruded and beveled to add more depth and detail to the grip.

The screws (highlighted for your convenience).

Next was the knife blade. It was much the same as the handle in regards to all the quad drawing but made slightly more complicated but the blade's serration.

Knife blade with more edgeloops than sense.

With that done all that was in order was adding a cylinder for the round thing that can be seen in the upper right hand of the above picture. Also added was some detail on the blade near the handle which was extruded and beveled.

Next was to mirror the handle and buttons.

Moving on from there I had to mirror the knife's blade.

The Tassle That Never Was and extras

When I first began my project I came up with ideas for Tassle that were a little different than what I finally chose to do.

I did quite like number 6's armour-dress-thing but it probably wouldn't have worked for the main character of a game.

These were the first set of thumbnails I did for Tassle. I combined aspects of the second and third sketches to create a more finalised concept. 

This was the result, note the silvery and strongly geometric designs.

There were two reasons why, already into the project, I chose to redesign my character. 

The first reason is that I though that the complicated geometric armour would be too difficult to model. Of course you could just call it "challenging" but I had no interest riving myself insane with difficult and demanding geometry.

The second is that I just go a bit bored of it. I don't know why I did but now even looking back at it I recall thinking that I could just do something different, something that wasn't along the lines of the first thing that popped into my head.

Now some extras.

This is a screen shot of one of my models of Tassle. I had to abandon it and start again because of geometry problems way above my pay grade, which was a shame because it didn't turn out too badly.

Gold and shiny! This design was done with a gold foil texture to make you think wealth.
which the Edwards certainly have

This one was toned down a bit more.

These are the designs I drew up as the symbol/logo for the Edwards Corporation who de jure own Tassle. It's just a circle with some liney nonsense and a barcode design beneath it and it can be seen as the background for the synopses write ups.

Summer Project

I can't remember the last time I posted something on here but I'm quite sure it was close a thousand years ago. Over the course of our summer holiday we were given the task to design, model and render a character for a (nonexistent) sci-fi game. The character had to be a cyborg and have at least two arms and legs. Simple enough. I thought.

 I looked at different designs for different types of cyborgy and mechanical things by many different artists. I had it already in my head that I wanted to do a human cyborg but one that was not a built-like-a-tank killing machine or a multi-appendaged mechanical spider queen. What I wanted to go for was something with less glamour like a servant type or ship pilot or someone part of a ship's bridge crew. I eventually went with the latter.

For our project we had to do a little bit of world building to set the scene for our characters. We had to devise a synopsis of the narrative as well as develop the appearance and traits of our character.

 

With the stage set set it was time to thumbnail Tassle, the name of all names I chose for my character. Personally I think it's a sweet, simple and endearing name and has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that I chose the name whilst looking around my room trying to conjure up something suitable and spying the tassels on my bedroom blinds. Nothing whatsoever.

Taking inspiration from my first and fourth thumbnails I set about to paint my character.

Now that I have my nice painty-uppy picture of Tassle I had to get to work on the back and side view to use as reference when modeling him.

These are said designs. I took the best side of my front painting and mirrored it for use to model the front view. Trying to get things to line up on the side view is not worth the time it takes and can break even the strongest willed individual. 

Next, of course, was the modeling done in Maya 2015.

Some perhaps not so hi-rez pictures of the low-poly model. 3D modeling is not my strong point point so it took me a good few tries to get the armour on right and I made a few alterations on the fly to the look of it keeping in mind the some of the detail was to be added on later with Mudbox, such as the eyes.