Maya 3D Workshop- 2/3/15

As this was our last session of our Maya workshops, we were tasked with creating a new model and trying to use all the skills we have learnt over the last few weeks. We were asked to make a UFO.

Firstly, I started out with a cylinder and then manipulated it to come up with my basic UFO shape:

I then started mapping out my UV's to enable me to take a UV snapshot and create my texture. After I had done this, I took it into photoshop and painted two different UV textures, a colour and a specular colour:

Colour texture

Specular Colour

The difference with the specular colour is that it determines how much light will bounce off your model. In short, how shiny or matte it will be. To make a surface really shiny you paint it white, and any areas you want completely matte are black. Other shades of grey with have more subtle differences, creating slight shines.

Basic colour texture on my model with no specular.

The final thing we had to do was use baking to creating more detail on our models. To do this, we created a duplicate of the mesh and then added more polygons, which allowed us to create a model with much higher detail. The idea of this was to add subtle details that we can then bake onto the lower poly model, which would be better for game engines to deal with (if you were to make a model for a game). We used the transfer maps option to create our UV normals, which will then tell our lower poly model what detail is going where:

After I had added this and my specular colour, you can really see a difference in the quality of the finished model.

Maya 3D Workshop- 16th Feb

This week we were moving on to create our planet. We were using a new piece of software alongside Maya called Sculptris; a free modelling tool which is more like sculpting clay than starting from scratch modelling. It allows me to create very high polygon models very quickly to create more detail.

To start with we opened a sphere in Sculptris, and began to add craters and texture using the draw, pinch, inflate etc. tools:

After I was happy with my model, I next had to export the object as a .obj file, and then import it into Maya. I could then create a new sphere to add over the top of my high polygon object, in order to 'vacuum form' it to create a low polygon version:

To create this low polygon version, I had to do something called 'baking'. This is a way of taking the detail of an object and imprinting this onto another object. In this case, we would be using our Sculptris designed model to imprint the detail on to our low polygon Maya sphere. To do this, we opened up a window and chose our source model and our target model, and then selected that we wanted the normals to be created and baked onto the object:

This would then export the sample we have taken as an image to allow us to see whether our baking has worked, which we can tell by the normals exported matching that of the object, rather than having odd bulges or other anomalies:

Once this was done, I separated the Sculptris model from the freshly baked model to see the comparison:

On the left is the original, and on the right is baked version.

I then sampled it again like I did with the normals, but this time using ambient occlusion.

Now that we had done this to our object, I could think about adding colours and textures to make it look like a more interesting object. I can do this in the same way as I have in previous models. First, I add a blinn, and then choose an image to add to the planet texture. I added my colour to the ambient occlusion so not to lose the properties it brought to the object. However, now it looked flat and so I had to use a 'bump map' which allows me to add my normals to my blinn to preserve the detail I had gained from it.

Now I have my planet!

Maya 3D Workshop- 9th February

In this session, we were going to review the spaceships of the last session, and start creating asteroids as part of our scene.

With reference to my spaceship of the previous week. I found it fairly easy to texture it at home. However, I came across a couple of issues. Firstly, my texture when applied turned parts of my model black:

As it turned out, I had to use the backface culling option to correct this. The tool may turn the backface of a model transparent to aid the speed of display or the manipulation of objects.

Also, I found that my object was partially transparent as I moved around it in Maya:

I couldn't figure out why this was happening, but I figured that it was something to do with my texture. As it so happens I had put transparency onto one layer of my texture for effect and then saved my file as a .png. However, this meant that the transparency was then applied to the whole of my texture and my model. So I saved it as a .jpeg, which fixed this issue.

Next I moved onto my asteroids. This was a much faster process as I didn't have to learn the basics of Maya as I did last week. However instead of box modelling, we started from a sphere:

We then started manipulating our sphere to create the distorted asteroid shape. Instead of manipulating faces, we were going to manipulate vertices instead. We could also use a tool called soft select, which would also manipulate the area around the vertex we had chosen in order to achieve a more natural and organic shape:

We then applied our checkered blinn and began UV mapping in order to add our texture. This took much more time than last week as we were working with a far more complex, organic shape:

After this was done, we created our texture as before, and then we had our asteroid!

First 3D Workshop: 2nd February

In our first workshop for 3D modelling, we were introduced to Maya, an industry standard piece of software.

We jumped straight into 3D modelling and were taught the cube modelling method. This is where you start with a 3D cube and then build your model from that one object. This is good practice and prevents trying to combine lots of objects together later on:

After we had completed the basic model of our spaceship, we had to light the model by creating UVs. This allowed us to determine how a texture would look when applied to our model to combat things such as stretching etc. 

After we had done this, we then took a snapshot of those UVs and brought them into photoshop to paint our texture:

Once we applied this to our model, we then could see the texture on the UV map. It took some trials and error to get them aligned perfectly,