ZBrush Stuff- Insert Multimesh Brushes

This weeks ZBrush class included an introduction to "Insert Multimesh Brushes". An exiting sounding term for what is arguably ZBrush's equivalent to kit-bashing, using pre-made tools of objects such as gun barrels and panels and slamming them on other objects.

Here is a monstrosity I conjured up whist getting to grips with the idea:

I started by throwing stuff onto a six-sided cylinder.

I continued to throw stuff onto the six-sided cylinder.

The six-sided cylinder now has a huge gun barrel sticking out the front. 

A front view showing added spine and barrel radiator detail

The finished (?) product. A large thrown-together space cannon.

For all your ship vaporising needs.

ZBush Stuff: Dynamesh

This week in our ZBrush lesson we were looking the Dynamesh feature of ZBrush. To get a feel for the feature we were told just to mess around and model what ever we wished, this was my result.

This is the front view of my space-borne monster-creature-thing I came up with. I looked at crabs and their shell for inspiration to help me with designing the creatures "hull". 

A side view, not that exiting.

The top of the creature is pitted with holes of varying sizes. I imagined that it would fire internally manufactured projectiles at its foes through these pits. They also have the added advantage of being visually disturbing and therefore interesting.

The rear "engine" of the beast. It needs to move in space somehow.

ZBrush Stuff- Head Sculpt

This year we started practicing with ZBrush, the 3-D sculpting program. When getting to grips with the software we were given the task of sculpting a head, using a pre-made base render and modeling and deforming it to make our own.

I began by warping the base mesh here and there with the move tool.

Here I moved the eyes farther apart and made his cheekbones and jaw stronger.

Softening the jaw ever so slightly, I made the dips in the temples more prominent.

Here I added another level of subdivisions.

After adding yet more subdivisions I flattened the bridge of the nose more and made the lines coming down from his cheekbones more severe. I also made a conscious effort to make his features more asymmetric and therefore more realistic. This can be seen in the placement of his eyes, nostrils, ears and on his jaw, chin and cheekbones.  

A three-quarter-ish view.

At a profile he looks slightly more ordinary and less chiseled and powerful than the image that is betrayed by the front view.

Another three-quarter view after a while of sculpting. I added hair (sort of) and pulled his cheekbones up higher so they didn't look as "off" as I think they did earlier. 

Not the happiest looking chap...

Another front view featuring stronger temples and forehead bone-star-ridge-thing.  

Maya Spring Assignment

With the deadline looming I am happy to say that I have finished this assignment on time, which is great for me so no dashing around in a hazy panic. I will admit that I found this assignment to be quite difficult, when it comes to Maya I am certainly not a natural but at least it can all be seen as a learning experience.

The model prior to being unwrapped. Not particularly exiting.

The unwrapped UVs of Finn. Not the cleanest unwrapping I know there are some artifacts of unknown origin. The garbled mess you see in the middle is actually one of his legs. Again, I have no idea how that happened but thankfully it had no effect on painting the textures.

Stages of Finn in the texturing process. Starting to look more like his concept counterpart.

The painted textures. Not the neatest but it did the job somewhat.

Lord. Those bloody shoes...

A front, back and side view of the finished model.

Now, as you ca see it is not perfect, far from it. I have made mistakes with UV unwrapping which came back to bite me in the arse. 

His shoes for start. Because of the way I had unwrapped the shoes it made it nearly impossible for me to steal a texture for the laces off of one of the concept sheets or even paint them on by hand without them becoming a horrible distorted mess, ergo I left them off which I know looks a tad jarring.

Poor UV planning on my part also made painting around the collar of the t-shirt and incredibly difficult task. The textured result is questionable at best. The t-shirt, thankfully, was very forgiving just being black with a logo and adding the face was a breeze, having added eye holey-bits on my model it was easy for me to size up and place the cut out face onto the texture map. 

Here's hoping I get better with time. Made with Maya and Photoshop as you know. About six/seven hours work.

End of Term Maya Task

In this week's Maya session were we given the task of modeling a human-ish character named Finn (of all names). This work is to be submitted on Friday 27th March and we will be marked on it. We have to model Finn, unwrap him and texture him how we see fit and will be judged on our efforts. Simple enough...I hope.

The blueprints, as it were, of  Finn can be seen in front of and to the left of what are the model's feet.

Getting to work. Starting on the feet and extruding upwards towards the head

The headless, armless body of poor Finn.

A more human looking model. Complete with head and arms. After a little more work the amount of polygons will be increased before the model is unwrapped, making it easier to add textures.

Done in Maya 2015 as opposed to 2014 because 2015 is far handier for unwrapping UVs.

Maya work: T-Rex

Over the course of the past few weeks in class we have been modeling a T-Rex in from scratch in Maya. The process is fairly straight forward: start with a cube and subdivide and extrude. Rinse and repeat.

  

The head under construction. It looks a bit odd to begin with but it's probably supposed to.

A side view of the same head, looking slightly more T-Rexy at this angle.I will admit that it took me about four damn tries to get the head right. 

Arm-less Hover-Rex is no less of a frightening killing machine than its cousin the apendidged ( I'm almost certain that that "apendidged" isn't a real word" T-Rex.

T-rex with the rest of the body extruded and shaped. Starting now to take shape.

A side view of the 'Rex near completion. Extruding the arms and legs are no walk in the park. Dodgy edge-looping on my end made for some quite awkwardly formed appendages. Thankfully they don't look too bad in this image.

Now this is a little different. In preparation for sculpting a model we had to unwrap the UVs of the T-Rex. Shown here is not my dinosaur but a pre-made one by our tutor, Robin. This one was used so that we could all be on the same page whilst doing this exercise.

The amount of polygons in the model were increased to allow for a smoother figure. Parts of the dinosaur were then cut out and unwrapped, as it were. This, as I said earlier, makes it easier when sculpting the model in another programme.

Maya Assessment- The Temple

For the 12th December, just before we break up for Christmas we have been tasked with modeling a temple design based off of another temple model to see how capable we are at modeling and texturing.

 The basic, untextured block form of the temple, showing wireframe.

After most of the blocking out the finer details were added, such as decals and tiles around the roofs.

A near-top view of the temple showing some colourised detailing aspects.

A textured version of the temple with wireframe on. Textured with brick and roof tile images created for this exercise.

Off-front view of the temple. Note set of missing pillars near the front of the building.

Front view of the building with all pillars where they are supposed to be.

A side view of the finished temple.

And a nicely angled view (I think) of the completed building.

All in all I'm quite pleased with the temple, I does manage to look like the original temple we were asked to model (at least to me), and for that reason I am happy. Some of the texturing, I admit, is a little off, perhaps to do with the polygons in which they need to texture although it is probably down to the fact that UV mapping and texturing is not my forte. 

All well, for now I'm rather pleased. 

Fish Animation

An animation task from a couple of weeks ago. The idea was to rig and simply animate a swimming fish. This was done following a Lynda tutorial on basic deformation and rigging in order to teach us the basics of animation.

Ghost fish!

First a skeleton was whipped up and added to the mesh of the fish model.

During the process areas that were not wanted to be effected by the movement of a joint were "painted out" with a Paint Skin Weights Toll with the value set at zero.

When all of that was sorted out the the fish was simply animated by moving and adjusting the joints and setting key frames. Simple as really.

The finished fish with skeleton and rigging in place.

A shot of the fish some point into its animation process.

Quite fun and fairly easy to do. I hope animation in Maya stays this was, but I have a niggling feeling that it won't...

(It also appeared that my fish was just plain white while the one in the tutorial video was a nice blue a yellow colour. A shame really. I wonder why?) 

Maya- The Turret

Over the past few week our class work has revolved around building and designing a gun turret which could be used in a game. Using simply square blocks I got to work assembling what eventually became this:

As you can seen not too much detail, at least not at this point but all was well for the time being it did, indeed, look like a turret. I say "all was well" because when I tried to texture it with a basic checker patter there was something definitely off.

Something had gone askew with the polygons inside the turret body warping the appearance of the texturing on the outside. But not all was lost, thankfully there were models provided to work from if we wished so I (unfortunately) had to abandon Warpy McSkewy and set off to work on a pre-provided model.

Our job then was to take the base of the turret and embellish our turrets with panels, rivets, spheres, greebles and nurnies (nurnie , stops being a word very quickly after saying it a few times. nurnie, nurnie, nurnie...). The result: 

 The turret base all kitted out.

The turret base made all lovely and shiny and detaily and what-not.

Achieve with normal and bump mapping.