Week 16 Summary

This week our Monday lecture focused on baking and introduced us to things such as cages, raycasting and X-normals, and then recapped on Normal maps and various other maps. It was a pretty useful and informative lecture, but it was another one of those lectures where we was not shown a lot since it's something that's better to explain when actually doing it.

The Wednesday session was a Photoshop tutorial which I was excited for (and enjoyed in the end) which focused on masking and how it can be useful in certain situations. The session was pretty calm and there wasn't really a lot for us to do in it so we could go at a slow pace which I liked. I ended up creating the image below, and I am surprisingly happy with how it turned out to be honest.

Our Maya session on Thursday was incredibly fast paced and somewhat aggravating as I could not keep up with the tutor whilst also taking notes, but even when taking notes I would end up missing a part which then meant I could not keep up with him. The session took what we was told about baking on Monday and progressed through us doing it practically. We baked a cube, created a normal map and then messed around in Unreal Engine 4 for a little while, which is pretty interesting, but overall the session just ended up annoying me more then it should of because of how fast the tutor was going through everything, and I feel like if I didn't keep falling behind then I would of really enjoyed the session.

The afternoon lecture was presented by Scott Grandison, where he discussed programming and what he has worked on within the industry. The lecture started of fairly plain, as he just showed us some basic programming, but then once he started showing off some of the more technical and advanced bits, especially the use of the Xbox Kinect camera, then it became a lot more exciting. Afterwards he showed off some of the games and other bits he has worked on, which was also pretty interesting. Overall the lecture was actually pretty good and I did quite enjoy it to be honest, it was both very informative and fun!

In my time outside of uni I have continued working on some of my models a bit, but honestly I haven't done a lot, which I should really reconsider as I feel like I am getting behind now, and should do more models in general really.

Vintage Telephone

Our third task after the lamps and barrel texturing was to create a vintage phone. The one provided is shown below and initially I thought it was quite daunting, but once I began looking at it as if it's just a bunch of shapes, it seems a lot easier. 

I started off by making the base. I started this by making a 4 sided pyramind, removing the top segment of it, and then using fill hole to create a new, flat face. I then extruded that face upwards and then slightly outwards to create the part where the phone holder will sit. At the bottom of the phone I started by extruding down and then outwards slightly in order to create the part that sticks out slightly. When it comes to the unfinished dial, I simply created a cylinder and extruded it multiple times. 

The phone holder part was a bit trickier. I started with a small cylinder and extruded it multiple times, then added in a couple more cylinders and then a couple of slightly squashed spheres. I then placed a larger sphere on top, rotated it 90˚ and then extruded along both centre points of the sphere so I could then connect them to other spheres. The curved point was simply the centre point of a sphere bridged to another centre point of a sphere.

To finish of the phone holder I simply just place in more spheres and extruded on two centre points of a sphere to create the prongs. I then duplicated this and mirrored it to the other side.

The handle of the phone itself started off as cylinder that I repeatedly extruded along both sides until I reached the point that it reached through to longer, thinner cylinders, where I extruded them separately. I extruded the initial part together so that it was symmetrical, but once it reached the sphere I continued working on them separately.

Both the ear and mouth piece of the phone were just created by extruding the sphere. I started on the top part of the spheres since it would be the easiest bits to do. The earpiece was fairly straightforward to make, as it mostly revolved around pulling down edges that I had extruded. The mouth piece started like this too, but once it reached the big curve part, then things began to get tricky. Originally, I planned to just bridge between the point I had left off at and a cylinder I had created as seen below, but when I did this it caused huge problems such as faces clipping through each other and other faces disappearing entirely, so I left the phone for a little while to think about how to go about this.

I eventually realised that I am going to have to extrude along the edges and slowly rotate and expand them each time in order to get the mouth piece quite right, so I decided to just crack on with it, although it was incredibly tedious and took a very long time, but I did create mouth piece which I think does look pretty accurate to the photo. I went back to the neck of the phone holder and created the two odd panel like pieces that stick out. I did this by creating a cylinder, removing half of it, using the fill hole tool to create a large face down the side, extruded that along, duplicated it so there was one for the other side, and then bridging them to a thin cylinder in the neck already.

At this point the phone was pretty much finished, although I still had a few things left to finish, such as the dial, the wire and the small holes for the mouth and ear pieces. Since we was recently shown how to make the wire I decided to try working on that whilst it was fresh on my mind, but the only problem I had was whenever I tried to create the wire and edit it, my laptop would crash, but I have started getting it to work now after reducing some of the shapes on the phone (since some overlapped) and removing unnecessary objects.

So the wire is virtually done and I've realised that it will probably be easier to include the holes for the ear and mouth piece via texturing, just purely because of how I've made it.

I created the wires using the technique shown to us previously, and then I combined the wires and bridged the ends of the two together so they became one wire.

I bridged the top of the wire to the phone itself, but before that I did have to extrude the two sets of faces a few times in order for them to align and actually allow me to bridge them together. I also bridged the wire at the bottom into the base of the phone. I then moved the dial up and rotated it so it could be placed onto the phone's base. At this point the phone was completed in terms of modelling it.

Week 15 Summary

Our lecture on Monday focused on materials, showing us the Lambert, Blinn and Phong materials in Maya, as well as materials in Unreal Engine 4, material instancing and then a recap on things like physically based rendering, albedo, normal, roughness, metallic and emissive maps, combining textures, ambient occlusion and realistic and hand painted materials. Whilst it was nice to get a recap on a lot of previous topics, we had also been shown these before as the Unreal Engine 4 stuff was the only brand new stuff really shown to us (since the Maya materials were briefly discussed with us during our Maya tutorials last week).

My Wednesday session was another critique session and this time everyone had a lot more work done so it was easier to get feedback from people. The feedback I got was very helpful and I shall be taking all of it into account. It was suggested that I re-consider how I go about making my 3D models because I have a tendency to overlap objects so polygons are being wasted, which makes sense so I will be going through my models and finding all the points where polygons overlap, as well as extruding shapes to create some parts of my model instead of creating a new shape and just hashing it to pieces. It was also suggested that I do more UV mapping since I haven't done any for any of my models I have made so far, which I do agree that I have to do some UV mapping, but I was then accused of wanting the UV mapping session re-taught to me because I stated that I would like to discuss with another tutor a couple of things about UV mapping, such as a reminder on how to align the checker grid with the faces of my objects. Finally, it was also suggested that with one of my barrel textures that I apply a lighter gradient to parts of it in order to make it look a bit more wood-like, which I agree with entirely.

On Thursday I had another Maya tutorial, although this time we was just shown how to make the cable for the vintage phone and then was left to do whatever we desired. Having the cable shown to us was a huge help and will definitely be an aid in the future because it was the final thing we really needed to be taught in order to create the phone.
The lecture in the afternoon consisted of a lecture from games developer Steven Huckle, who had worked on Sims 3, Tomb Raider, Transformers Universe and various other games. He spoke to us about his experience in the industry, his work and his website sharkinfestedcustard.net, which helps people set up development studios for making games. His lecture was both entertaining and very informative which both kept me listening whilst also informing us all about various facts and intriguing information. This will also be a great aid in my group's presentation which is due within a couple of weeks (although we still don't know what we are supposed to be doing really beyond the research task assigned to everyone).

In my free time I have managed to continue working on the vintage phone, to the point where it is almost complete now, as well as starting to create a weapon for a character of mine. I plan to have the models for the phone and the weapon completed by the end of next week, as well as hopefully tweaking the lamps and the character, so that I can begin working on unwrapping them all and possibly even texturing them in the future.

Weapon design

Just like how I wanted to create a character of mine, I decided I wanted to create a weapon of another one of my characters. This character is Meloda, a small Imp who uses a sniper rifle in combat, with a bayonet attachment and the ammunition being the spheres around her belt.

I started this off by just mashing simple shapes together and creating the vague shape of the gun, with no idea how to really go about making it. I showed this off during a critique session and got a very mixed reception, although I began to realise how I could actually make this.

I kept all the previous parts from before, but I did not want to reuse these so used them merely for reference. The non-higlighted of the gun below was originally just a cube, which was extruded upwards. The faces on two sides of this cuboid were pulled slightly to make them rounder, and then the bottom part was moved outwards so that it would keep the rounder look as opposed to an extrude literally pulling them out without altering the faces around them. The flat sides of the gun's stock was then extrude and pulled inwards to match the slight dip visible in my gun's initial design. To make the gun's grip I simply extruded and pulled and tweaked the edges and faces, which became very tedious at times but I eventually did manage to nail it. To make the slight rounded connection between the two gun parts, I just extruded some more, deleted some faces and then extruded the edges to the point that there is a completely flat surface for the second part to sit in.

The second part (the selected part) is simply a cylinder with 3 sides flattened and the last side pulled up at various pointed across the faces. The edges at the top were then extruded upwards to create the alcove-like part seen below, which is where the barrels of the gun will sit.

The barrel of the gun is just an elongated cube that sits in the alcove I created in the main body of the gun.

Below is the final gun model. The differences between the image above and the one below are:
-The scope
-The trigger
-The button and screws
-Second barrel and knife

The scope I created with a cylinder, extruding one end of it and expanding it out slightly. I then needed to make a dip within the main body of the gun so that the scope could comfortably sit on top, which was done by simply flattening and lowering some selected faces. Some faces of the cylinder were then extruded down so they touched the gun.

The trigger was simply extruded out of the top of the handle, but I did create a small gap around the trigger just like it would on an actual gun, so that the trigger can easily flick inside the gun when pulled.

The button, located on the main body of the gun next to the small extruded rectangle, is just a small cylinder, and the screws, located on the rounded part at the start of the stock/above the grip, are spheres cut in half and extruded slightly on some of the faces on top.

The second barrel is a duplicate of the first one, albeit shorter. The ends of the barrels had the outside edges pulled outwards to give them angled ends. These were then extruded inwards to give them the exit holes for the bullets. The bottom barrel however has a knife held inside instead.

The knife is just an altered 3 sided pyramid with two faces stretched to give it a more knife-like appearance, and the extruded along the bottom face. A cylinder was then created for the handle, which was altered slightly to make it look like a handle, even though you won't see this part.

Overall, I am incredibly happy with how this turned out. I think it resembles my initial design almost perfectly and it looks great overall. It's pretty simplistic for a gun, but then again the design is simple already. I just need to smooth some bits, UV map it and then texture it and it should be complete.

Week 14 Summary

This is the first week back after the Christmas break and things seem to be get steadily back up to pace already. Monday consisted of a lecture about advance modelling, showing us some more advanced techniques such as subdivisions, topology, floaters and kit bashing. Wednesday consisted of a life modelling session that focused on hands and perspective, where we did a series of short hand sketches followed by short full figure drawing. On Thursday I had a Maya session in the morning that allowed us to practice most of the techniques shown to us in the lecture on Monday, followed by another lecture in the afternoon briefly explaining our contextual studies topics for this project.

In my free time I managed to finish off my character that I started making in Maya a long time ago, and also managed to continue working on this blog and did a little bit of 3D modelling. The character I am semi-happy with, although I feel it could of gone better, although this latest Maya session allowed me to finally finish it after being taught about bridging and combining. The new techniques shown to us are fairly easy to remember and I can already see them being incredibly useful for me. I also took notes on these so that I could remember them in the future should I forget them (which is very likely). I do feel like I am going to get behind because of how slowly I am doing things lately so I will crack on with doing a lot more work next week.

Life Drawing 4

This week's life drawing session focused on hands and perspective, which was something nice and a bit different from the usual things we do. 

Below are my hand sketches, drawn in pencil. We was given varying time intervals in which to draw them in, and as you can see very few of them are actually finished. 

These are the perspective sketches, and whilst we had a lot longer to do these in (varying from 12-15 minutes), I still did not complete a single one. Regardless of that though it was pretty useful.

Barrel Texturing

Our second task was to texture a pre-made barrel. During this session we was given this task, we was shown how to uv map the barrel, and then showed how we could texture it. This is what I made in the session, which I thought wasn't too bad for a first attempt, but I definitely wanted another shot at texturing it. 

My first attempt resulted in it looking like this. It followed the same base as the texture above, with only the wooden parts being different. I created the wooden part with the Poster Edges filter, but soon realised the black was far too strong compared to the brown.

This is the final texture I made, which is an edited version of the one above. The black has been edited to a shade of brown, and the barrel now looks a lot better then before, although it doesn't look too much like wood, but regardless I am pleased with it. I also filled the background in brown because in some parts of the previous texture there were small white lines where I hadn't textured. This is easily my favourite and best texture I have done for the barrel, but I may come back to it in the future so I can make a better looking one.

I also decided to begin working on metal texture, which I think started off pretty well, but hasn't really gotten anywhere beyond the basic colouring.

UV mapping videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Brh1JRL9OoY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrxPfMquK_U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLhazEa8wmw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yZpD4DSeWI