Low Poly Tree

I was really tired all day today, and that being the case I kind of didn't do much work. I know, I know. "Lame excuse, you just need to sit at the computer to model!" But, in the end I just sat at my desk working on Maya a tiny bit and watching videos. I am a terrible multitask-er. 

BUT

I did get a little something done. I figured I would feel bad if I didn't post ANYTHING and I was interested in kind of taking the low poly art style for a spin. 

I just threw a lambert over it for the green color, but  I think if I went through and actually worked on the coloring a bit I'd be pretty happy with this model. I do plan to make a legit low poly tree scene in the future, but I'll probably remodel the tree. I did this one very quick and it could definitely use some better 'tweaks'. 

I 'm going to try to start thinking up some game ideas where I could incorporate this low poly style. RPG/Platformer?

I think a game using this low poly style would be a very simple, yet aesthetically appealing game.

I need to learn how to make this tree scene look pretty. Unfortunately I really need to focus on modeling right now, but hopefully in the next few months I'll be able to move on to texturing! 

Introducing Autodesk Maya 2013 Chapter 5: Patch Modeling A Locomotive Detail

Project Overview

The book goes into explaining how often times as a modeler one will need to attach  surfaces so the model doesn't split at the seams. So in order to avoid this splitting I went through a process of aligning and attaching NURBS patches by stitching the pieces together, which is called patch modeling. Because I'm so inexperienced, patch modeling was a major pain in my butt. 

The Locomotive Detail

Starting the NURBS Pump

So to create this piece I learned the benefits of Freeze Transformations. Basically if you make any adjustments to the size, location, or rotation of the object the values in the channel box will change. By freezing the transformations it sets all of the values back to the default. Definitely something I wanted to know.

I created a NURBS cylinder, duplicated it twice, and shrunk down the sphere to make up the two 'end caps' of the cylinder. The end caps are what I had to freeze the transformation of since I had to scale them down and move them over. Now any adjustments I would potentially have to make to them would be incredibly easy through the use of the channel box. The three rings were then duplicated to make the smaller cylinder and end caps.

Learning to use Detach Surfaces. It was a little annoying, even though the book warned me about it, when I'd first go in to detach the surface it just wouldn't work and I'd have to go in and do it again. It doesn't add all that much time to the workflow but I was angry that I couldn't get it at first and kept 'undoing' when I really just needed to do it again with the history still intact.

Adding Endcaps

To achieve this effect I had to add isoparms and use the hulls the scale the isoparms down to almost close off then end caps. Then I connecting the endcaps to the main cylinder using lofts.

Stitching and Tangency

So in this section I went through and attacted the loft piece the end cap and cylinder, this process helped to smooth it all out. I then had to detach the cylinder from the end cap for a later step.

I actually made some mistakes in creating my lofts. My cylinder wasn't close enough to my two end caps so the  loft wasn't horizontal like it should have been. The attaching NURBS tool mostly smoothed it out though.

Next I created a loft between the two larger cylinders on both sides and made it so that the loft would curve around the cylinders a bit better.

The next step really started to confuse me. A good sign it's time for bed. Hopefully it will all make sense when I finish this project tomorrow.

Awesome Low Poly Art Styles

Here are the art styles I'm considering for my first attempt at a game a bit further down the line.

As my first game is probably going to be aimed towards a Moble App my models will need to be between 300 - 1500 polygons per mesh.

Look how amazing low poly models can be!
The Poly count is super low, but with really good texturing they can look GREAT. I think all of these are less than 500 tris. Which, once you do the math, means that, on average, there are only 250 polygons in each character!

That or maybe make an entire game in this low poly art style.
Amazing.

Even just going old school with character models like those from FFIX. I believe most of the models in the game were around 500? Basically this is the same technique as the first art style I like, just a little bit less chibi. 

This is pretty cool too. 

Introducing Autodesk Maya 2013 Chapter 5: NURBS! NURBS!

NURBS

This is just a screen shot of me playing around with the CV NURBS tool. Nothing fancy.

Lofting

Here I learned how  to connect two different NURBS lines to make one plane. 

Revolved Surface

I actually got to play around with Surface Revolutions when I was modeling the catapult. It seemed like the coolest modeling technique at the time. It's still pretty darn cool. This is a wine glass I made using a simple NURBS CV path and then revolving it. I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. 

Extruded Surface

 

So next was learning how to make a profile curve (the CV's I've been working with so far) follow along the path curve  (PV's). Looking at the diagram in the book seems to me to be a bit deceiving. I placed everything where it was placed in the book and my end product came out like this. Notice how it's all pinched in the middle? Not good. 

So I worked with it for a while and finally discovered that if I moved the PV from the middle of my CV to the sharpest curve along that CV the curve wouldn't bunch up. In this case the CV was in an "I" shape and I ended up moving my PV to one of the points along the horizontal part of the shape. Hard for me to explain. Unfortunately I didn't take any other screen shots. But if for some reason anyone is curious let me know and I'll go a little more in depth. 

Here is the finished product when I moved the PV 

Much Better.

Planar Surface

I'm sure this will come in handy further down the line. I took two NURBS circles and created a plane with a hole in the middle of it. It could be used for tattered dragon wings or something to that effect. 

Beveled Surface

This was pretty easy I simply drew a shape with the CV tool and then beveled it. 

Boundary Surface

Probably my favorite technique. I had to draw four CV paths and then create a 'boundary' from them. I think you could make some really neat stuff with this! 

Combining Techniques

For this exercise I created two lofted  surfaces and connected them with a third surface. The directions on this part were a little bit harder to follow. In the end it was just a lot of switching between modes to be able to select the correct components in the correct order.

Converting NURBS Model to Polygons

In this section I converted a NURBS model into a polygonal model, which if I want to put anything into a game would need to be done. The axe file was already created, which is sort of a bummer, I would have loved to go through a step by step on how to model it myself.

Ah well.
The one on the right is the NURBS model and the one on the left is in polygons.

Introducing Autodesk Maya 2013 Chapter 4: Catapult

This project was from Introducing Autodesk Maya 2013 Chapter 4 Beginning Polygonal Modeling. 

In this chapter they went through and gave step by step instructions on how to model a catapult. They did actually have me veer off on my own near the end to model the catapults arm, net, and a few other components.

So this is my first 'Major' modeling project, if I ever re-do the project I will do a step by step of my progress so I can later look back and see what I could have done better. I think it turned out pretty good, though the net is somewhat wonky. I'm hoping that when it's animated it won't be too big of an issue. Though I should probably go back and remodel it entirely so that everything is more or less perfect. Maybe later. Riiiight.

 I really wish they would have done the step by step instructions for the arm and net and had me work on some of the other stuff on my own though. The arm confused me until I realized how to extrude and set the offset in order to better model some of the details. As I said above my net is still wonky, so if someone has, or would be willing to make a tutorial video, PLEASE let me know about it! 

Well, overall I'm pretty proud of my first project. I can't wait to finish the book and get started on some of my own projects!



Things I need to work on:

Scene Management: My scene was fairly organized in the outliner, most of my objects were grouped accurately, however I think I want to try working more with the layers.

Keeping Track of my Pivots: A lot of my pivots are kind of all over the place. This probably won't become an issue until animation phase if at all, but it'd be better if I just kept track of all of that while I go.

Introducing Autodesk Maya 2013 Chapter 3: Decorative Box

In this chapter I was given step by step instructions on how to model a decorative box. I was given reference images to use as guidelines on the size and shape of the box and then learned a few handy techniques in order to model it. 

This project was fairly easy, nothing to extensive. However for some reason I ran into a problem when I went to bevel the top. It wasn't beveling correctly. I wish I had taken a screen cap to show you what I mean, but hindsight being 20/20 and all. I actually ended up having to basically restart the project  from the beginning in order to get the beveling right. From what I could tell I hadn't done anything different, but obviously I angered the Maya gods in my first attempt. 

In this chapter I learned a little about hypershades, which was fun. 

I think the box looks rather 'sharp' regardless of the fact that the edges are beveled. I'm hoping once the texture is applied it will look better. Overall pretty happy with how it turned out, but it wasn't very challenging to begin with. (Other than that one beveling issue)

Introducing Autodesk Maya 2013 Chapter 2: Modeling a Solar System

In this chapter the book mainly focused on getting me comfortable with Grouping, Hierarchy, and delves a little into hypershades. 

Here's a screen shot of my scene.

OKAY. So in the project I decided to get ahead of myself and try to make this project better. Initially the book only tells you to give a hypershade to ONE of the planets. Instead I decide to give hypershades to ALL of the planets. This would have been fine if I then hadn't decided to animate the sun to actually look like it was on fire. I also went and made sure that all of the planets were rotating the sun at the same relative speeds that they would in real life.

Here's my beautiful sun. As you can tell my particles aren't perfect (way too many solar flares), but I was pretty proud.

I'm going to be honest, I'm worked on this project a few months ago when I was 'trying' to get into maya, so now I'm not really sure exactly what went wrong. Now that I'm trying to go into my old project it looks like when I went in and rendered the Animation some of the planets would completely disappear from the scene and everything is an awkward color. I think I'll rework this at a later date, but follow this youtube tutorial.

Here's a screenshot of my rendered video.

It's hard to tell because it's all weird/black and white, but there are some moons rotating around a nonexistent planet. I don't know what makes THAT planet so different from the ones that I can view, but it's just not salvageable at this point. It's hard to even know what to search for to fix the problem. As you can see I added some paint effects to make it look amazing.

What I need to work on:

STOP GETTING AHEAD OF MYSELF. It ended up ruining the whole project  for me.

I was still able to learn valuable techniques in learning how to group and rotate objects, as well as learning to work with the Hierarchy in order to make sure the planets rotated around the correct axis. So, all in all, I still got everything I needed to out of this project, and more. However, it would be nice to have a finished product that's not all buggy.

My Journey

Hello everyone! Today I'm starting a Journey I've been meaning to start for the past year. I've always loved art, and as I grew older I loved playing video games. I liked the idea of making someone happy through video games so much that when I was in middle school I decided I wanted to become a 'Video Game Designer'. However, now that I'm older I understand how broad of a category that is, how difficult it is to become a 'Game Designer' in the industry, and realized that it might not actually be what I want. So in order to stay true to my love of art, I've decided to focus my goals towards becoming a 3D modeler/texture artist so that I can create the characters that I love.

This blog will become a sort of timeline of my Journey. It is my hope that I will post something once a day, which will hopefully kick my butt into high gear. I've been wasting my time playing video games when I'm not working. I really need to set my priorities and gain a bit of self control.

Wish me luck. I'm hoping you will start to see a lot more of me.