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.

Frog Shaman

This is the final design I came up with for my anthropomorphic frog-creature-thing, a task given a couple of weeks ago as you know.  As you know with everything and anything like this; moodboard:

It's not particularly difficult to tell what direction I chose to go with my design is it?

The finished piece. An Aztec inspired frog shaman guy with feathery headdress and all that nonsense.

About two hours in Photoshop (I think). Overall I'm pretty happy with him but perhaps he's just a little flat colour wise. All well.

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.

Frog Concepts

This week's Photoshop session was about anthropomorphism ("anthropomofhtfhtfhtfhfthfff" is usually how it is pronounced). Basically, the idea of adding human elements to something which is other wise inhuman. In class we were tasked to come up with concepts for anthropomorphic frogs with the intention of producing a more finalised design later on.

The moodboard. As one might expect it is full of frogs.

   My three finished concepts based off of some of the more interesting frogs on the board.

Number 1 being a type of frog elder or traveler or something. I don't really know, he's just a frog with a stick.

Number 2 is some kind of frog shaman.

Finally, Number 3 is some type of frog soldier or guard type person, complete with feathered helmet.

For my final design I might do a cross between Numbers 1 and 2. Some kind of staff wielding frog shaman with a Mayan-Aztec-Inca-South-American feel to it.

Concepts took about one and a half hours to do and were painted in Photoshop (but you knew that already).

It's Pronounced GIF!

This is a piece of class work from a couple of weeks ago. In class we were given two exercises to do. We were told using Photoshop's layers to animate some GIFs stolen off of the internet by our tutor, Steve.

The first of which was a simple GIF of one of Jabba the Hut's Gamorrean guards from Star Wars.

We had to make our own tweak to it however, adding glowing blue eyes to each frame. Which can be seen in the above.

Next was a GIF of a simple walking girl.

To this, however, we needed to add something else. We were tasked with giving the girl something like a hat or perhaps a weapon. I chose the latter, as can be seen, and opted for a nice spiked flail (not too spiked mind you) great for those midsummer afternoon strolls through the park wouldn't you say?

All in all I found the process fairy simple if not just fiddly a times, having to go through all the layers and rubbing things out and adding new things frame by frame. Tedious perhaps, but simple enough so I can't complain. 

Texturing Class Work- Directx 11

Today in class we did a spot of texturing in Maya with the help of Phil, the course's technician. The work also involved using Directx 11 which was also  a bit of a break from the norm.

The rather stark beginning scene seen here. It's quite simple. A barrel, a boarded up window, a wall, a guttering pipe, and a drain.

The lovely textured barrel seen here. Perhaps the metal hoops are a bit too light against the wood of the stave (the use of accurate barrel terminology is a thinly veiled attempt to try and make my self seem more knowledgeable than I actually am).  

The barrel sitting in a more textured environment.

A slightly more stylish view of the image above better showing the grated drain by the guttering.

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.

Steampunk Homework

The task at hand for the last two weeks was to come up with a steampunk design of anything we wanted be it character or vehicle, animal or weapon, animate or inanimate, the choice was ours. As with any design task, say it with me; moodboard:

With the moodboard in mind I came up with an idea for a character of a steampunk lady gunman person. Because I'm highly original that way.

So I sketched some ideas out both on Photoshop and in my sketchbook. See if you can guess which ones were drawn where.

I was partial of my idea seen in number 3 of the gunman wielding two pistols rather than a sniper rifle sort of weapon. I was also drawn to the idea of the character having a face mask similar to an early camera.It was different and I thought that it could add to the piece. 

My final design. The character features the camera inspired face mask-thing as well as two revolvers inspired by the British Webley revolver.

The final piece took about four hours in Photoshop (I think). I don't thing there was any part of this piece I found more challenging than another, it's just a little tedious here and there, but what isn't I suppose. 

Lava Monster

The homework task this week was simple: design a lava-monster-thing.As with anything I began searching for anything lavay which could help me with the task at hand. The moodboard itself:

With all this to help me I scribbled down a few thumbnails hoping to develop a good idea or two.

I wanted to do something with concentric circles. Why? Because they look cool.

I was quite partial to my final two designs, number 4 and number 5. Although I was very fond its ethereal and almost angelesque (if that's a word at all) nature I forsook number 4 for 5 as I was in favour of 5's monolithic structure, especially the huge megalithic block which sat on its shoulders and from which its head was also attached.

The upper torso features a more prominent red hazy-glow from the lava to help separate it's head and shoulder-block-thing from the rest of the body. 

 The finished piece, the monster seen here standing in a pool of its own leakage.

In all the process of painting the finished piece took about three hours. I chose to stick with a deep red for the lava for stylistic reasons with some yellow-orangeyness going on near his eyes and mouth to draw the views eyes. 

Mudbox Workshop

A few weeks ago we had an Autodesk Mudbox tutorial by Tony Mayor, a man with expertise in the area of  3-D sculpting.

The first thing given to us was to experiment with the different different tools that Mudbox offers on a poor, unsuspecting cube. This was the result:

The "Eldritch Cube".

We were also encouraged to experiment with the texture stamps Mudbox offered.

Textures seen here on another poor, unsuspecting cube.

We were then shown how to make are own stencil textures in Photoshop and were encouraged to play around with that function.

A simple black and white stencil made in Photoshop.

The stamp being used to decorate (I use the term loosely) a poor, unsuspecting sphere.

We were also shown the painting functions contained within Mudbox. It's fairly basic even primitive when compared with the likes of  Photoshop but useful for throwing colours or even textures onto an object.

Seen here is the UV channel of a poor, unsuspecting sphere with textures and a smattering of colour thrown on.

With the basics down it was now time to model something proper, or at least decorate something with the skills we learned. To do this we were to work on a poor, unsuspecting T-Rex.

The work in progress.

The finished article, sporting a somewhat rhubarb and custard inspired colour scheme. Perhaps not much in the grand scheme of things but I was quite happy with how my "Fabulousaur" (yes that is what I named it) turned out.

Just a picture of wrinkles I used as a stencil to work on the above.

Overall I was quite impressed how easy to grasp the Mudbox system is and how natural and intuitive it is to use. In many ways it can be seen as the yin to Maya's yang.

 

Lizard Dude

At the beginning of the term we were given the task of painting and finishing a sketch of some lizard-warrior-guy-thing from an online tutorial by Feng Zhu of FZDSCHOOL on YouTube. The task was fairly straight forward: paint the lizard guy using skills and hints taken from the videos and finish him off with lizard skin textures.

There he stands in all his glory. Perhaps not my most inspired work but I was fairly happy with the outcome. Using photo-textures like the scales seen on his head and shoulders are a cheap and easy way to quickly add detail to a piece. 

First Homework of the Term: Muscle Work

Oh Lord, it's been over a month since I last posted. Right, as the title says, our first piece homework of the term was to draw a label front and back view of a skinless body all in the name of getting to know musculature. So without further ado the sketches:

And now the pièce de résistance: the front and back view (I know, terribly exiting...)

There it is. That's it. Shows over.

Surprisingly (at least for me), drawing this didn't take me as long as I thought it would, granted, it's perhaps not the most accurate diagram of human musculature in the world.

Although I'm am not really one for more technical work this was far more enjoyable than drawing the skeleton and it helps you realise what unforgivably complex machines we are.