3D break anyone?
So I’ve recently been working on my second big 3D project or second demo reel really. And it’s starting to really feel like working on a demo reel again. In other words, it’s starting to get stressful, and somewhat annoying. I still enjoy it though, so no worries. But to keep myself sane over the past few days I had decided that it had been far too long since I had worked on anything traditional. About a year to be exact, and even before that I wasn’t doing a lot of it like I used to be. So anyway, here were the results:
I don’t usually draw people either, so this was actually pretty fun.
Male Space Armour
So I finished my male space armour to complete the collection:
It was actually pretty fun to model this character as well. And I actually think that if I didn’t suck at faces so much, that I may even consider character modeling. Maybe with more practice. I was actually able to finish modeling and texturing this in about a day and a half. So that’s not too bad, although it is all clean and new, and that made it pretty easy I guess. But that’s about half the time it took me to do the female armour so it’s still improvement I guess.
And now that the character modeling is done and out of the way, I can finally start working on the environments which is what I really want to do. I’ve already started modeling the exterior of the spaceship, which I guess still isn’t technically environment modeling, more prop modeling, but I’m going to count it anyway, because the spaceship is going to be my environment.
My new Project
So now that I’ve graduated, and finished my demo reel, I’ve decided to endure a new project… I mean have fun making a new project. It is actually more the latter so far though really. I’m actually having fun in Maya again!!! Even with the UVing and texturing too! What’s going on?! I think it’s because there’s no real pressure involved in this, and no REAL deadline… of course I should make one to follow or it will never get done, but at least I don’t have to feel obligated to follow it too strictly.
It’s going to be space themed, and I’ve finished a female suit of armour
And here’s the turnaround:
I’m also making a male suit of armour which will probably end up being displayed in an armoury of some sort aboard a spaceship of some sort… obviously I haven’t worked out all of the details yet, however I’m actually pretty excited about this. And I actually had fun doing character modeling, although I don’t think I’ll ever do that much of that because I really suck at modeling faces. But you never know.
As a side note, I recently joined Deviant Art if anyone’s interested, here’s the link:
Texturing
I know it’s been a while since I posted… I guess I’ve been distracted with my demo reel.
But anyway, on monday, we’ll be finishing our texturing class. Yes, term two has almost come to an end. We were given three assignments to work on gradually through the term. We were provided the tree models, the only one that I modified was the shed, and some small changes in the other two models. The things we had to texture were a shed, xbox 360, and a turtle.
here are the video turnarounds of the final results:
Shed:
Turtle (Based off of the Koopa turtles from Mario):
And the Xbox 360 which I gave a Bioshock theme to:
Texturing was actually a really fun course this semester, and I’ll be looking forward to it in 3rd semster now.
Weight Lifter
Last week we finally finished our second assignment for Animation 2, and it was of course, the weight lifter. One of the typical animation assignments I’m sure. We had to do it back in our 2D course as well. Although, I definitely enjoyed the 3D version much better…. and that’s scary considering how much I loathed animation in first term. But honestly, I really do think I’m starting to like animation in general much more than I used to. That’s not to say that I’m at all considering a (sought after) career change. But I’m not dreading the new projects. And after the last two assignments, I’d even go as far as to say that I’m liking XSI a bit more too… did I just say that!? I would still ALWAYS choose Maya over XSI for modeling, but I’m starting to get the hang of XSI a bit more. I guess it’s the same as what I said for Combustion in my last post.
Anyway, here’s the final production:
My teacher provided us with both the marine and the mech character in this video, but I modeled a simple environment and prop to go with it.
I still had a few problems with it. For one, I couldn’t get the shadows to be cast on the ground (still frustrated with XSI for a few things I guess). And I think a few of the movements could have been cleaned up a bit still. He moves his leg a bit too fast at one point. And it’s still taking forever to render because we haven’t been taught how to optomize yet… definitely looking forward to that.
And compositing bites the dust
Next Wednesday will be our last compositing class… yay… an extra day to work on our demo reels!! That extra day is actually going to be pretty important.
In the first term, I have to say, I really wasn’t enjoying compositing, or “Combustion” at all. The software seemed so complicated and confusing, and I really didn’t know why we were using it compared to other video editing software. But After term two, we learned a lot more. We used it a lot more, and thus I came to understand it a lot more. It really does have a lot to offer that I didn’t know about… particles for instance!! which are in my videos that I’ll post at the end. But I’m really actually starting to like this class a lot more than I thought I would… still doesn’t compare to Maya classes, but I definitely enjoyed it.
Here are some videos I made this term:
That was a dust particles assignment
And that was a ship particles assignment
And finally, the one that I had most frustration with, and am still not happy with, the CG on Real assignment
My first problem was that I didn’t use a tripod. Which was actually on purpose, but it ended up causing way to many problems. I stabilized the footage, but that only made it half better. I was going to add the ship to the stabilized footage, and then destabilize it to look like it was shot without a tripod, and the ship would match the movement… but it didn’t work, and I had to try and fudge it a bit… but I don’t think it turned out.
Anyway, I really enjoyed this class this semester, and I’m looking forward to next semester now.
My First Character
For the last three or four weeks, our class has been working on our very first character assignment in Maya. Up until now in our modeling class, we’ve basically only been modeling environments and props. So far characters are fun, although the face is quite complicated, and time consuming. And this was a low poly character, so it’s only going to get more complicated from here on out.
Renders of my first character
And here’s our reference:
Everyone got the same character reference… we didn’t get to choose. But that’s okay there will be plenty of opportunity for that. And with this being our first character, I actually prefer the reference being given to us, so we could follow along with the teacher as he taught us how to go about modeling this. And being a low poly character, we did have a poly budged of 5000 tris or 2500 faces. My model was 3168 tris and 1769 faces. So I’m under budget… yay!!
As fun as characters are right now… I think I’d still rather stick to environments, but I’m still enjoying building characters for now.
Finals, Finals, Grey hair, Finals
I thought I’d do an actual post about school now that this was initially for school. And what better topic than finals? We just finished our first semester about two and a half weeks ago now, so we had a couple of stressful weeks leading up to the end there. I particularly enjoyed our “3D Design” final… and no, that’s not sarcasm. I’m going into environment modeling, and our final project was to model an exterior environment, so I definitely had fun with it.
I decided to model St. Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg Russia. I made it with Maya. Here’s a picture of how it’s turned out.
I know not everything is textured, but that wasn’t the point of the assignment. I was just testing to make sure I knew how to texture the skybox and the special alpha card branches. Sorry everything else is so grey and boring.
Here’s a real picture:
I may decide to work on it further, and even possibly put it in my demo reel. I don’t know if cathedrals and churches are too typical on demo reels though. I’d also have to change all of the angel statues because I borrowed the “biped man” from XSI, as we had no experience with character modeling at that time.
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