Introducing Autodesk Maya 2013 Chapter 5: Building a TeaKettle

I love learning Maya, but the times that I have the most fun is when I'm actually modeling something worthwhile and slightly challenging. I dislike the side projects that just teach me some of the tool because I'm not coming out of the learning experience with something tangible.

Which is why I enjoyed making this Teakettle! Creating it used most of the tricks and techniques taught through the earlier parts of this chapter, as well as giving me a finished product. The Teakettle.

Unfortunately I didn't take progress photos like I should have, but here is the finished product!

Overall, I like how it turned out! 

Things I could fix

The back looks a little deformed

The spout is a little short

The handle looks a little. . . big? 

Introducing Autodesk Maya 2013 Chapter 5: Side Projects

The rest of chapter five took me through some of the Deformer Tools that maya has to offer.

I didn't take any screen shots due to the fact that I went through the parts pretty quickly and it kind of slipped my mind, but I learned how to use the Bend Deformer so that I can 'bend' object. It would be very useful in creating tubes on a space suit, or pipes in a city, among various other projects.

I also learned about the Flare Deformer which as the name suggests, allows me to flare objects out. Which will come in handy for tweaking objects to get the shape I want.

Next I learned how to use a Lattice Deformer

The book has a model hand ready for me to work with.

So what I did was I created a Lattice which allows me to choose points on the lattice and deform the entire hand with those points.

In this project I was to deform the hand with lattices to create a hand that looked more Alien. In order to do this I created a lattice around the entire hand to elongate it, and then individually placed lattices around the fingers in order to individually shave the fingers to make them look more alien.

This is a great tool if you want to make tweaks to a project without having to go through and individually select vetices, faces, or edges. In addition to being easier, depending on what effect you're trying to achieve, it's also much cleaner. Often when working with individual vertices my project gets a little messy. When using a lattice your model remains clean.

This is what I ended up with. I'm not extremely happy with it, but I wasn't really trying for perfection as much as I was just playing around with the tool to see what it could do. If I did it again I'd put more time into and definitely put a little more effort into the thumb.

Overall I wasn't too impressed with the lattice. I could see how it would be useful later on down the road for editing pre-existing models, or for tweaking them, but it wasn't all that fun to learn.

Until the next section.

In this section I learned about Animating Through a Lattice. 

I was instructed to create the effect of a balloon squeezing through a tube. In order to create this effect I created a lattice for the 'Balloon', a simple poly sphere, and then moved it over to the tube, an open ended cylinder, I had to edit the lattice so that it was flared on the ends and squished down in the middle to form to the tube.

This is the effect it produced. 

Can you tell I had a bit too much fun with this part? It was a blast to make 'swooping' sound effects as I moved the ball through the tube.

 Ah, the simple things in life.

Last but not least I created a starfish. I created a polygonal star and then used subdivisions to create the 'star fish'. I really don't like how mine turned out, and I also didn't really enjoy working with subdivisions. Which leads me to believe I didn't understand them as well as I should have. I'm going to have to go back to them to practice them some more.

Here's my finished product.

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.