Week 13 Summary

This is the final week before Christmas but things have not really slowed down. On Monday we had a lecture discussing how to texture an object and different types and ways of texturing, although like last week this was a very short lecture as it is more something that we have to do ourselves to fully understand, so we will be continuing it during our Maya tutorial on Thursday. Not much happened on Tuesday but Wednesday consisted of a Photoshop tutorial about texture brushes which was incredibly interesting and helpful, so I will definitely be practicing those and acquiring more of them in the future. On Thursday we continued developing our skills in Maya by learning how to apply textures to a 3D. We did this by using a barrel already created by our tutor, setting it up to texture, and then simply using the UV map as a net to design a texture within in Photoshop. Obviously the main texture idea is wood but I am not particularly good at creating textures from scratch, although this will be a good way to practice, as well as to try out the texture brushes. In my spare time I have been working on the model for my character a little more although I am still struggling to get things done for it, let alone actually getting time to do 3D modelling with some recent events.

Over Christmas we have been tasked with texturing the barrel again but with a different texture, which I want to further develop some wood textures or create some sort of pixel, cel shaded or metal barrel texture.

Week 12 Summary

This week was also pretty quiet as we still haven't been set any large tasks to do. Our lecture on Monday covered UV mapping and various terms for it such as Seams, UV Space, packing, UV Shells/Islands and Texel Density, as well as the reasons checker patterns are used for UV mapping, those reasons being:
-UV scale issues.
-Easy to identify distortion,
-Flipping UVs (facing the wrong way).
-Identify seams.

On Wednesday we had a critical session where we got feedback on what we had done so far. Whilst any feedback is good, this session felt a bit underwhelming due to small amount of work done by everyone because there hasn't really been a specific task set for us beyond making a lamp or two in Maya, so our feedbacks only lasted a couple of minutes each. I also did not really get much feedback about the work I had produced beyond some new techniques and keyboard shortcuts, which will be helpful in the future.

Thursday was another Maya tutorial session where we was taught UV mapping and essentially showed how to make what we was shown on Monday, with the session continuing into next week for more UV mapping practice. Honestly UV mapping is pretty complicated and it has started putting me off 3D modelling again, although I'm certain this is just another thing that I could learn and get the hang of in the future. A problem I had with the session itself was that I was easily getting lost or missing something that our tutor was telling us so I frequently had to stop and ask our tutor for assistance in order to get me back on track, which although he was happy to do, was bugging me a little bit, but it is more that I just don't understand the program as opposed to any fault by the tutor, program etc.

We was tasked with just continuing to practice with Maya and 3D modelling in general in our own time so I decided to start working on creating a character of mine in Maya that I felt could be simple enough to make within the program, although I have started to struggle creating his fingers, which is something much easier to create within ZBrush since Maya is better for more artificial objects.

Using Maya for a character design

To step away a bit from constantly making lamps I decided to try and create a character I have created in my own time called L3D.


Below is my current design for L3D, a simple levitating robot.

L3D is pretty simple which is why I decided to try and make him, as I could use him as a practice model for UV mapping. The body was simply made from a sphere whilst his head is just a sphere and a bent circular pyramid, created using the same tool to bend the neck of my gumball lamp. The hands however were a lot harder to create, and I started off with flattened spheres and some cylinders as seen below. However I decided to leave these for quite a while as I could not figure out how to create the fingers properly.

I decided to leave this model for quite a while since I really did not know how to create the hands (although it was recommended multiple times that I create them in ZBrush, I wanted to test what I could really do in Maya, and focus on more natural objects in ZBrush). I eventually realised how I could create the hands after a Maya session which briefly showed us the Bridge function, essentially creating a connection between two selected faces or edges.

I created the fingers by creating two cylinders and a cone, rotating and moving them into position and then bridging them along the flat faces. Then I simply tweaked the new edge created during bridge so that it was more pointed as opposed to a flat line.

We was also shown materials in Maya and how different ones work in different ways, such as Blinn being good for metals, so I decided change the material of L3D's model to this since he is meant to be a robot, as well as changing the colour to green.

All that is left now really is to finish off the palms and merge or combine the two separate parts of the head.

Links

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg03ZZd6Lhw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CPYXi8wEvE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJFwspxvxS8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZO1p23f0TTk

gumball desk lamps
http://st.hzcdn.com/simgs/38a156f90d4dfa5a_4-6316/modern-desk-lamps.jpg

Week 11 Summary

This week has been pretty quiet to be honest, with the lecture on Monday I learnt about some of the techniques to do with 3D modelling and what our new project is about, but we wasn't informed about any specifics so I could not really do anything until Thursday when I had my first session with our new project leader, where he introduced us to Maya and what we need to do this week, which is to create lamps in Maya. At first Maya seemed as complicated as ZBrush and I was almost immediately put off by using it. However, upon using it a bit more, as well as downloading it in my spare time, I found out that this program isn't as complicated as ZBrush and I am actually starting to enjoy it.

Between the lecture and the Maya session, I had a life drawing session on Tuesday which went well, in fact probably better then my previous life drawing sessions. Outside of these sessions and the lecture though I really did not do a lot because there hasn't been much set for us, I just created the lamps I had to create in my spare time, which I ended up creating a third lamp because I felt the one I made might be a bit boring (as well as wanting to mess around with the program a bit more), and worked on this blog. Overall this week has been quite quiet and easy, but I'm sure the weeks will get busier just like before.

Lamp models

In my free time I downloaded the student version of Maya and created 2 lamps from it.

My first lamp is based on a gumball lamp, and was pretty much made the same way as the lamp made within the tutorial. It mostly consisted of distorting, moving and rotating objects made, although I used the extrude tool to hollow out the lamp's head and create the sockets for the plug on the base. I also tweaked the vertexs and faces, such as with the faces of the light bulb (originally a sphere) and stretching them to create the neck of the bulb. I am even more pleased with this one then my first lamp, and the more I play around with Maya the more I am actually beginning to like it.

Because I wanted to try Maya out a bit more I decided to create a 2nd lamp outside of the tutorials. This lamp was a lot simpler but I liked the look of it. However, it doesn't seem to have a specific name beyond a Sterling Desk Lamp or LED Lamp. The LED part was a bit different to work with though as I didn't have to create a bulb and instead an area for a series of LEDs to sit in. To create this, all I did was make sure the cylinder had enough subdivisions so that I could select some vertexs and pull them up into the centre of the cylinder a bit, creating a flat indent underneath.

Personally I think these both look pretty good considering I am still learning how to use the program, despite the fact that neither of them are that complex.

Before finalising my lamps I wanted to add a bend to the neck of the gumball lamp. To do this I had to watch various Youtube tutorials on how to bend objects, discovering various ways in which to do this, but in the end settled on the the technique of selecting the object and then going to the Deform tab, then to Nonlinear, and then to Bend. I could then also tweak the curvature and change where the deformation occurs within the neck of the lamp. Eventually I got to the point where all I had left to do was to tilt the lamp head down and place it onto the lamp's neck, thus making the lamp replicate the gumball lamp more.

Maya Workshop 1

My first workshop with my project leader introduced us to the 3D modelling program Maya. During this session I learned some of the basic commands and inputs in order to create and manipulate objects, such as the shortcuts to rotate, move and distort an object, the functions of the extrude option and the ability to manipulate the vertexs, faces and edges. This was quite a nice start to learning Maya and I found the session to be incredibly useful, although there were points where I missed something or misunderstood, but my tutor stayed behind after the session for a few minutes to quickly show me those bits I missed. Initially I started dislike Maya as much as I did with ZBrush in the previous project, but as I learnt these basic things I have actually started enjoying it a bit, and will work on creating more lamps in my spare time in order to start refining my very limited skills and reminding myself of other controls. How our project leader went through the tutorial was a lot more effective for me as I've managed to learn and memorise almost everything taught to us, as well as the tutor.

The lamp above is what I created in the session, and I am pretty happy with it considering it's the first thing I made in this program. It does look a bit odd because the neck doesn't have a bend to it, but our project leader said we would go over the bending another day.

Life Drawing 3

This session of life drawing focused more on portrait sketches as opposed to full body sketches, so it allowed us to focus more on one area and adding in more detail. We started off by doing 16 small sketches like usual, but instead of having different time increments the model would move his head to different angles and would use different facial expressions. I managed to finish a lot more of the drawings compared to previous sessions which is nice, but a problem was was that the model had a habit of moving and changing facial expressions slightly during the drawings (which is understandable since each drawing was at least 3 and a half minutes long) but it caused problems with keeping continuity within the drawings. But overall it was a good session and I'm pretty happy with these drawings, I feel that they are easily the best pieces of life drawing I have produced.

These first drawings were the 3 and a half minute ones that were created in pencil. They were simple enough to do and I enjoyed creating them.

This next image used both pencil and white chalk, and was a lot longer then the previous drawings, spanning roughly 30 minutes. I'm quite proud of this piece as it actually looks quite nice in my opinion and I feel I managed to apply the chalk well.